Q & A
by Alara Rogers
Summary: Not related to the pro novel of the same name. Q answers questions about himself. Now complete, but a sequel will be posted.
1. Introduction

**Introduction**

I have to do this _again?_ Simply because I've been away for a few hundred years and lost track of some ridiculous mortal linear-time-based schedule?

Ah well, I suppose when one consorts with creatures of limited intelligence, one ends up repeating oneself far more than one should have to.

I am Q. Those of you of sufficient intellect and puissance to grasp my nature already know who I am. The rest of you... well, it's hardly my fault how sadly evolution has shortchanged you.

* * *

_Author's Note: Since late 2003 I have played Q in a LiveJournal role-playing game called "Theatrical Muse", where they pose a question every week and I write an answer, in character. I have been using them to explore the character, generate new story ideas, and make philosophical arguments that I can use in later fics, and I think that a lot of them are sufficiently interesting that I decided to start posting them as an ongoing series. The title should not be confused with the Keith deCandido pro novel of the same name; since the structure of this story is literally questions and answers to and from Q, I couldn't resist._


	2. Guilty Pleasures

_What's your favorite guilty indulgence?_

**Guilty Pleasures**

If you must know, I try to avoid the sensation of guilt under most conditions. I prefer to be a law unto myself, and to make my own rules. Obviously, when one is making up the rules, there's nothing to be guilty _for._

_Unfortunately_, some stuffy and entirely boring individuals of my acquaintance have, historically, rather more influence in my society than I would like. Which is to say they had more influence than _me._ Even for the omnipotent, it's difficult to stand against the opprobrium of one's peers without feeling a teensy tiny modicum of guilt.

So, my guilty pleasure? Humanity. They're small, petty, underevolved, downright idiotic, arrogant, and most of them have no sense of humor. Plus, their fashion sense has completely disintegrated over the centuries, so the only attractive clothing they know how to wear are military uniforms and period costumes. (Don't even get me started on the jumpsuits.) They're entirely beneath me, and I really shouldn't find them nearly as fascinating as I do... but I do, and I confess, it hasn't escaped my attention that my little hobby has occasionally made me the laughingstock of the Continuum. Or started civil wars. It is a tad hard, even for me, to avoid feeling embarrassed about that.

On the other hand, life is too long not to do things one enjoys, even if one has absolutely no idea _why_ an obsessive interest in a race of furless monkeys should be quite so enjoyable. I've more or less given up feeling embarrassed about my hobby (it does help that they helped me win a war. That tends to impress even the stuffiest Q.) After all, they keep me from being bored, and when you're immortal and you can do anything you want, boredom is quite literally a fate worse than death.


	3. Question Bucket

**Dear me, you mortals _do_ ask quite a lot of questions, don't you?**

Scrolling backward through time, I notice there have been quite a number of these silly questions. Ah well. Some of them may be downright entertaining. (Others, however, are simply idiotic. New Year's Resolutions?)

_Do you feel that you were born with a predetermined role in society? If so, how do you feel about it?_

I answered this one already, but the question annoyed me, so I was rather terse about it. It's actually rather more complex than that.

In a sense, I suppose this _is_ true. I wasn't exactly born, precisely, but I did come into existence to fulfill a role within my society... which, of course, the ingrates have never been happy about my taking. In a word, I exist to question. It's been my job, and the job of others like me, to point out that the emperors of the Q Continuum have no clothes on. (Well, of course non-corporeal beings aren't wearing clothes, but you see my point.) We push the boundaries of the allowed, and the allowable. We may set the new trends or we may overstep the edges of good taste, but the point is to act as an engine of change within a society that, without those like me, would be condemned to stagnation, crushing boredom, and eternal, immortal death within life.

The reason I answered the question "no" last time was that this is something of a sore spot with me. I don't hold my role because anyone told me to-- that would entirely miss the point, in fact. I do it because I want to. It's fun, and it suits me, at least when it works. Which is where the sore spot comes in. Despite the fact that the Continuum essentially created me to fill this role, _they_ don't want me to do it. Heaven forfend we should actually try to _change!_ Or try anything new! Perhaps my role was predetermined, but those that determined it no longer want me to do it, since it involves the embarrassing concept that I might mention, loudly and at length, that they are boring and their existences are pointless and futile.

We actually had a schism over this, eventually. I fought a war for the right to change and grow, for expanded freedoms within the Continuum. And I won. And I ended up part of the same leadership body I'd spent five billion years criticizing. And now I feel they may have co-opted me, that they're _trying_ to force me into a new role, one I was _not_ designed for and one I most emphatically do not want.

_What are your New Year's Resolutions? _

*blink blink* What, I'm supposed to pay attention to Earth's solar calendar? I think not. Next question!

_Any reason to get blindingly drunk? _

Yes. Unfortunately it's very difficult when you're omnipotent.

_How did you lose your virginity? _

With which species? I believe I've enjoyed some form of pleasure-reciprocating activity with over 33 thousand at this point. (Species, not individuals. There's quite a few more individuals than that. I play favorites with certain species.)

_Do you believe in love at first sight? _

No. Often those that seem most interesting at first turn out, on further testing, to be thoroughly unworthy of your affection.

_What's more important, self-preservation or forgiveness? _

That depends. Are you going to have to live with the results for eternity? In the case of other Q, self-preservation and forgiveness are identical. They have to be. I know of no immortal species where individuals manage to hold eternal grudges against each other without a permanent schism developing in the society (I betcha Metatron could tell you all about that). If you're going to be seeing someone's face around for the next twenty billion years, it is important to forgive them for minor little infractions like PUTTING YOU UP AGAINST A TREE AND TRYING TO EXECUTE YOU-- so, all right, perhaps I need to work on the forgiveness thing a little harder, but then, I didn't say it was _easy_, only necessary.

On the other hand, there's no good reason to forgive mortals if you don't want to. On the third hand, if the mortal in question is really interesting, then once again self-preservation and forgiveness work together, because if you're going to run around holding grudges against every interesting mortal you run into due to them, oh, say, not letting you be crew on their starship, then you'll be bored, and for a Q, boredom is death.

I would say that self-preservation is definitely more important but frequently the most effective method of preserving one's self-- or one's dignity, or one's enjoyment of life, or any number of other things-- may involve forgiving those who do annoying things to you. I mean, if I was going to hold grudges against every Q who's ever betrayed me, insulted me, tried to shoot me, thrown me into a wall while I was trying to teach her about her exciting new existence, walked off and left me with a kid... well, the list goes on, and the point is, if I did that there wouldn't be a single Q left in the Continuum I could spend any time with.


	4. Dinner

_If you could have dinner with anyone in all of history, who would it be, and why?_

**This is downright silly.**

What historical figure would I have _dinner_ with?

I believe I've actually _had_ dinner (or... other things) with every historical figure I had any interest in having... mmm... dinner with. When you're five billion years old and all of space and time is your playground, this is not the sort of question that needs to remain hypothetical.

Besides, what qualifies as history? I don't live in the same linear time most of you beings do, so for me who qualifies as a historical figure depends on who I'm talking to and when _they_ exist.

That being said, thus far, I have not successfully talked either Jean-Luc or Kathy into having dinner with me. Not that I eat, unless I feel like it, but humans do so love to mix socializing with their silly nutritional requirements, and I'd be delighted to have an opportunity to simply hang out, without having to have an excuse like "the Continuum is at war" or "I have tests to conduct here" or something like that. Unfortunately, no matter _how_ boring whatever they're doing is, they always act as if it's more important than spending time with _moi_, so I really will have to come up with a decent excuse one of these days.


	5. Tombstones

_What do you want on your tombstone - and why?_

**Tombstones?**

Tombstones.

Could there possibly be a more irrelevant question to an immortal entity?

Oh, I have encountered things that could destroy me, but firstly, I have no intention of ever encountering them again, and secondly, should I be unlucky enough to have a fatal run-in with one of them, it's awfully unlikely that there'd be anything left behind to memorialize, or anyone who'd bother to do it. The Q don't need pithy little epitaphs; we remember our dead well enough, on the few occasions where one of our number has died.

During the war, every time a Q was killed a star went supernova. I suppose that's more of a tombstone than any of us actually wanted.

In any case, I have given no thought whatsoever to what I'd want on a hypothetical tombstone, for the simple reason that I never intend to need one.


	6. Laughter

_What makes you laugh?_

**Laughter as a raison d'être.**

What makes me laugh?

Many things, which is good, because if there was nothing amusing in the universe I'd probably destroy myself out of boredom. When you're an omnipotent immortal, finding things to amuse yourself is as vital as food and drink are for mortal creatures. You may not be able to die-- not easily, anyway--- but you can certainly wish you were dead.

So, what amuses me?

Well, I amuse myself, of course. Nothing like being self-sufficient. I devote a significant portion of my vast intellect to the pursuit of the perfect witty retort. However, this becomes rather pointless when no one else has the skill level to play, so I would have to say that I am at least slightly dependent on finding conversational partners that don't bore me.

Humans are a very funny species at times. I used to hang around at the Algonquin Round Table, trading quips with the likes of Dorothy Parker, George Burns and Groucho Marx. Ah, that was fun. Reminded me of the early days of the Q Continuum, before the others all got so stultifyingly dull. And Jean-Luc's provided me considerable entertainment over the years-- both when he's trying to be funny, in which case he makes quite a witty bantering partner, and when he's trying to be earnest and serious, in which case he's such a pompous, arrogsnt windbag it's hilarious to listen to him.

I also think it's really funny when you force some pathetic mortals to recognize their own foolishness-- and they STILL DON'T GET IT. Okay, listen to this one. There was once this species where, due to a natural mutation, about half the population had blue hair and half had purple. No other genetic difference. But they used to come up with _all_ sorts of ludicrous distinctions, like blue-heads are happy-go-lucky drunkards with no head for practicalities, or purple-heads are overly violent, or whatever. And they made people live with these stupid stereotypes. So one day I turned all their hair green. Did that make them realize the foolishness of their prejudices? Oh, no, no, no. They had the idea that they could do personality tests on people to find their original hair color, and then passed laws saying they had to _dye back to it!_ Oh, if I weren't immortal I'd have died laughing at that one.


	7. Senses, and Desert Island

_Hearing, Sight, Taste, Touch, and Smell. The five senses. Which would be the worst one for you to lose, and why?_

_If you were left on a desert island, what three things would you take along?_

**Five senses and a desert island?**

Why am I becoming overwhelmingly convinced that these questions weren't written with my species in mind?

If I had only five senses... this question wouldn't be nearly so stupid.

I have considerably more than five senses. I am virtually omnipotent. This means that I can not only do anything I want, I can also sense anything I want. Discussing which of the human five I would least like to lose is laughable; I don't care that much about any of them. The senses I would least like to lose tend to be the ones that pertain to my powers and my natural state, and I'd have difficulty describing them to the sort of limited minds that could come up with a question like this.

But, I suppose.... _sigh_ In the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit that for one hellish day I lost all my senses _but_ the human five, and had I been forced to remain that way, I suppose I would have developed a greater attachment to some of them. I never did get to experience what all the fuss is about a sense of taste, a sense of touch comes packaged with the ability to feel pain and that has to therefore be one of my least favorite, the sense of smell mostly just delivered me a number of unpleasant stinks, and so I imagine that _if_ I were limited to five human senses, it would be either vision or hearing I'd least like to lose.

Lose vision: be unable to see when potential enemies are zooming out of force fields trying to kill one.

Lose sound: be unable to hear everyone else's whiny blathering.

Hmm. I'm thinking, vision.

As for a desert island, you _must_ be joking. I can't be stranded anywhere. I'm a Q. I can instantaneously teleport anywhere in existence I want to go.

I was, once, stranded in a pocket dimension, with no contact with the outside universe and no control over my powers. That was... rather worse, actually, than losing my powers entirely and becoming human. The boredom was simply unbearable. You can't imagine.

If I were going to be stranded somewhere, anywhere, with insufficient control over my own powers to get back home, it would be the boredom I'd most need to deal with. Nothing resolves boredom quite like a sentient being to talk to, so the three things I'd bring if I were stranded somewhere and could not use my powers to escape are Jean-Luc Picard, a replicator to feed him with and a power supply for the replicator. (I'm assuming my own powers would not be up to this task; if they were, I could just snap my fingers and leave.)

Not that I want to dismiss Kathryn Janeway, of course, but if I'm looking for _intellectual_ stimulation, as opposed to other sorts ;-), I believe I'd prefer Jean-Luc. Besides, he'd whine about his ship slightly less. The thing about these starship captains is their belief that they're absolutely indispensable and that if they're gone their first officers, who they otherwise profess respect for, will run their ships aground completely. In Kathy's case, however, this happens to be true; Will Riker may be something of a buffoon with bad facial hair, but he seems to be relatively competent at running Picard's ship, whereas I can't say the same for Commander Chuckles The Wilderness Man. Kathy would simply become obsessed with escape-- which, of course, I imagine would be impossible if _I_ were stranded; how could one mere human accomplish an escape when a Q could not? Jean-Luc would be a lot more fun.


	8. April Fool's Day 1

**Ah, April Fools' Day.**

Normally I find paying attention to assorted mortal calendars tedious to the point of absurdity, but I make exceptions for a small number of mortal holidays, and the humans' April Fools' Day is one of them. I've been a trickster god to enough species that I admit to getting all warm and fuzzy inside when I find a holiday that celebrates the trickster, and while modern humans have managed to bowdlerize their holiday until it's about nothing but puerile practical jokes, this day was originally about reversing the accepted order of the world, about chaos and misrule and _fun._ They used to turn their notions of everything inside out on this day, to play for a day at being someone they could never be in everyday life, to make kings into beggars and beggars into kings.

Of course, ever since we won the war the joke has been on me; it turns out that reversing the natural order of things and making the trickster, the court jester, the fool whose job it is to point out that the emperor has no clothes, _into_ the emperor... well, in real life it's a lot less fun than when it's a game for a single day. I've been entirely occupied with inane stupidity, aka Continuum committee meetings, for... quite a while even in terms of this timeline. Somehow more than half of the most advanced species in this universe continue to manage to be complete idiots... it doesn't seem to matter who holds the most privileged positions within Continuum hierarchy. Except that now, I actually have to _pay attention_ to these incredibly stupid ideas instead of simply mocking them and then boycotting the rest of the meeting. Frequently I think life was easier when I was a marginalized questioner of the status quo than now, when I'm one of the leaders of the Continuum. (Ouch. The phrase "I'm one of the leaders of the Continuum" still strikes me as an April Fool's joke all by itself.)

In any case, I'm back, and it seems the questions have improved somewhat in my absence. Or perhaps anything that isn't a meeting of the Continuum just seems much more pleasant now.

_What is your favorite daydream, and why?_

One would think I wouldn't have one. Daydreams are fantasies of things you cannot do or have, or things you have not yet succeeded in doing or having. I can do or have almost anything I want, and usually it's instant, too. What would be the point to having a daydream if you can instantly realize whatever you fancy?

But I confess, I'm in truth only _nigh_-omnipotent. There are things I want that I cannot easily have. Or, possibly, cannot have at all, though that's a depressing thought I try not to think much.

Chiefly among those things I want and cannot have is Jean-Luc Picard.

Oh, get your minds out of the gutter. I don't mean for sordid mortal reproductive activities (or non-reproductive, as the case would probably be); I can't say I'd turn him down if he threw himself at me, but sex is hardly a necessity for me. I don't have hormones and I'm immortal and anyway, I've already reproduced and once was probably too much. I feel desire if and when I choose to feel it, which, as I'm not fond of frustration, would be when I think it might be fulfilled, which would not be in this case. It's not mortal sexual activity I want him for-- I'm far more ambitious than that. Please, if you were going to last eternity would you obsess over fleeting moments of physical pleasure?

I want him to become a Q. I want him to join me.

I have, I confess, _some_ small smidgin of patriotic altruism to my motives. The Continuum needs Jean-Luc. The war clearly indicates to me that we've lost our way, and while we're struggling back to a path that allows us to change and grow, the fact that we're fighting the habits of billions of years is hurting us. Our society is predicated on the notion that no one in it is ever weak, is ever in need; we scorn compassion, and empathy, and fight to keep ourselves as separate from one another as we can, which was fine when the biggest threat came from us subsuming one another, but now that we have guns and we can kill each other, we're walking on eggshells. We don't know or understand diplomacy; we understand compromise, but we generally work by trying to steamroller each other, which, again, worked better before there were guns.

Humans have qualities the Continuum needs, if we're to survive without having another war. And Jean-Luc is the human who most embodies those qualities. I thought perhaps there were things we could learn from him _before_ there was a war, and now I'm certain of it.

It's not just that, though. Yes, I love my people and I want us to survive, but I am fundamentally a selfish entity. I want Jean-Luc to become a Q because I want to teach him everything there is to know about the universe. Because I want him to be there for me to argue with in ten billion years-- let alone another hundred. Because he's the first mortal that's really, truly interested me in millennia. And while I'm less stunningly bored than I used to be now that I have my child and my expanded duties to the Continuum (or, perhaps, equally bored but with far less free time to try to occupy with something less boring), the idea of losing one of the few things in the universe I find genuinely fascinating has no appeal.

But Jean-Luc Picard will probably never agree to join the Continuum. Because _I_, in an unparalleled fit of stupidity, "proved" to him that humans can't handle the power... by making WILL RIKER, of all people, a Q. The truth is, Picard couldn't be a Q now-- he's too tied to his mortal existence. But someday, he'll be old, he won't be able to be a starship captain anymore, and when his body's failing him and he's bored and alone and tending grapes to give himself something to do... I'll still be there, and I can offer the limitless possibilities the universe has to offer. And he'll turn me down, because Will Riker couldn't handle being omnipotent, as if one has anything to do with the other. And he won't agree to let me preserve his life. And he'll die, as mortals do.

My daydream is that he'll accept, and join me. It's a daydream, rather than a plan for the future, because I'm very much afraid that I know better.

_What is the most important decision you've made in your life and why?_

Things have a way of interlocking. You do something small and stupid, but it sets you up for far more important events to occur later on.

I chose to test humanity because two close friends of mine thought so highly of the species, they ended up disobeying the Continuum and being executed because of their desire to emulate humanity. Someone was going to get around to it, and I was bored, so it was me. I picked Picard because he was the captain of a ship called Enterprise, and a previous captain of Enterprise had, to my great amusement, gotten the better of three old... acquaintances... from my ill-spent youth. And because he was headed to Farpoint, where this energy jellyfish was whining so loudly and incessantly about the pain of its captivity that I was either going to send it some help or annihilate it just to get it to shut UP.

A complete whim. I hadn't researched Picard much ahead of time. But because I chose him, I ended up setting off a chain of events which not only changed _my_ life profoundly, but indirectly transformed the Continuum. I would never have had the strength or the courage to go up against the entire Continuum if I hadn't had the experience of trying to sacrifice my own life to save other mortals, when I was mortal myself... and I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't chosen Picard's ship to be mortal on, and I wouldn't have chosen his ship if I hadn't tested him in the first place. If I hadn't been interested in humanity, I wouldn't have been on hand when Kathy inadvertently let Quinn loose, and if Picard hadn't passed my final tests I'd never have put such an important decision as the life of a Q in the hands of a mere mortal, and if I hadn't done that the war wouldn't have happened...

I've done very significant things, recently. I chose to have a son. I chose to fight in a war rather than surrendering. I chose to challenge the status quo until they went to war to stop me. But the most significant thing I have done, the thing that triggered all the rest of it, was my entirely whimsical decision to test Jean-Luc Picard on his Enterprise's maiden voyage.

_If you could change one moment in your past, what would it be?_

None of them. I'm not that stupid.

Do I regret? Hell yes. I believe I mentioned how deeply I regret what I did with Riker. I regret... I regret exposing Jean-Luc to the Borg in a way that would make them personally interested in _him._ I regret having the child that I did have, because as it turns out, he worked for one of the reasons I wanted to have a kid but has totally failed for the other reasons.

Would I go back in time and change any of these decisions? No. (This is actually one of my few limitations-- I _can't_ go back and change my own decisions without creating a very destructive paradox. But if I could I still wouldn't.) I am, I think, reasonably satisfied with who I am today. Satisfied enough, at least, that I don't want to play craps with the universe. See, what mortals generally don't realize is that everything they have done-- everything any sentient with free will does, mortal or no-- goes into making them who they are. Go back and change what you did, and you change who you are-- and I would at the _very_ least want precise information about who I was changing myself into before I did such a thing, and such information is damn hard to come by for oneself even when one is a Q. I can look up a mortal's possible futures with no difficulty, but looking up my own runs into feedback loops.

If I went back and changed what I did, I would change myself, in unpredictable ways. And overall, much as I complain about it, I prefer what my life is now to what it once was, and I don't regret the changes I instigated in the Continuum. So no. I would not change anything.

Although _not_ giving Riker Q powers is an awfully tempting might-have-been...


	9. Son Of Question Bucket

**More of these silly questions?**

I actually rather liked the last set. What a pity these are mostly quite banal again.

_How do you handle confrontations?_

*broad grin* As frequently as possible.

Oh, I should clarify that. As frequently as possible, provided that I have the upper hand. :-) I won't run away from a conflict where I don't have the upper hand but I won't instigate one, either...

...oh, who am I kidding? I instigated the war in the Continuum -- admittedly I never thought it would come to _weapons_, but I certainly expected strenuous conflict and some certain degree of risk-- and I never honestly expected to win that one, or at least not as quickly and thoroughly as I did.

All right, you have me. I'll confront anyone, anytime I feel like it, which could be because I feel it needs doing or because I'm just bored that day, whether or not I think I can win-- though generally speaking, I rig the game so I'm likely to win before I begin the confrontation. :-)

I thrive on conflict. Discussion, debate, knock-down drag-out arguments of the sort where people throw asteroids at you, challenges, games, whatever gets me through the eons. Judging from my brief stint as a mortal and how spectacularly unsuccessful I was at not instigating conflicts that day, I'd guess that even if I were unfortunate enough to be weak and virtually powerless I wouldn't be able to stop myself from challenging everyone and everything around me. How fortunate for me, then, that the one body that has ever had the power to stop me is now largely beholden to me. :-)

Actually, that question was rather fun.

_What's the oddest gift you've ever received?_

Received? *blinks* Have I _ever_ received a gift? What _would_ anyone get the entity who has everything?

I've given plenty of gifts, and many of them quite, er, creative, which I suppose could be defined as "odd." Once I gave a young child a balloon that would follow him around like a faithful pet instead of flying off into the atmosphere first chance. I gave a certain android a good belly laugh, and gave a roguish young woman considerable aid and protection as a gift both to her and to her former boyfriend. The Jinarii weren't very _grateful_ for my gift of shapeshifting powers, but then, who knew their neighbors would try to kill them for it? Likewise the Calamarain could have made better use of the gift I gave them instead of, well, trying to kill me for it, but you know, some people have no concept of gratitude.

I suppose I might say that when Data saved me from aforementioned murder attempt by the Calamarain, at significant personal risk to himself, that that was a gift. If so, I suppose I have to call it the oddest gift I've received, as... well, didn't someone else use that line about it was the only gift they received? Damn, I hate repeating other people's good lines. But, unfortunately, it's the truth. I haven't received any other gifts I can think of...

_If you could live anywhere, where would you live?_

I _can_ live anywhere. Next!

There is no next yet? How very dull. All right, all right, then; the only place I would ever choose to live would be the Continuum, for what I hope would be the fairly obvious reason that if I left it permanently I'd lose my power and immortality. On the other hand, I can vacation anywhere I want to, for however long I want to, so long as I don't attempt to live among mortals as myself (that is, if I wanted to live among mortals I'd have to go incognito or curtail the use of my power; if I want to use my powers, and be myself, I'm limited to visiting and hanging out for a bit before going elsewhere.) So, effectively, I can live anywhere.

If I could choose to live among mortals, as myself, with free use of my powers... well, I wouldn't. Tried that once, but I'm a trifle more mature now, and I know why it's a bad idea. But if it wasn't a bad idea... well, there was a reason I tried to join Picard's crew, twice.


	10. Talk About Politics!

_Which is better, democracy or monarchy?_

**Democracy or monarchy for who?**

For what species? I'll narrow it down to Humans and Q-- I could go on and on about any number of species, but there's only two I care about lately.

Humans are such troubled little creatures. Crawling between heaven and earth, they're crushed by the weight of their own biology while they try to reach for the stars. Democracy appeals to human reason and the human sense of fairness. Why shouldn't everyone get a chance to choose the rules that control their lives, after all? And when one controls for human stupidity, by restricting their democracy to a certain degree, it works well for them. Rationally.

But they have a hunger for a king. A big daddy, a noble ruler, someone greater and wiser than themselves who'll just tell them what to do so they don't have to think. It's in the biology, the need to bow down to an alpha. Usually a man, although I've seen human societies practically worship a queen as well. And some serious ugliness can happen when they try to turn an executive leader in a democracy into a king. Which they do when they're scared enough. Humans let reason and fairness fly out the window when they're scared enough.

For Q, there's no question. Absolute and total democracy is the only way the Continuum can function. The only thing that can control one Q is a number of other Q working together. We don't have a need for a big daddy to tell us what to do; we were all born adults. (Well, except for the two Q that weren't.) We don't need to belong to something larger than ourselves; we're all quite large on our own, and besides, we belong to the Continuum, and one body larger than ourselves is frequently too many. We have been known to have certain factions end up taking control for many millions of years at a time... in fact we just fought a war to kick the people who'd been in favor of stagnation out of control for the first time in half a billion years. But for the most part, we are all loudmouthed, opinionated, strong-willed and very capable of holding our own in an argument, so the Continuum ends up having to listen to all the Q before making a decision for the simple reason that we will just yell until the others pay attention. (Why, yes, I did spend half a billion years doing that way too often.) The idea of all of us following any one single Q is absolutely laughable.

I agree to a certain extent with my old pal Loki (*), by the way. But it's not the _forms_ of government that need to change constantly; if you find a form that works well for your biology, use it. What needs to change frequently is *who* is in charge. Even in a pure democracy, factions form. Every so often you need to have a revolution... though *most* of ours have been bloodless.

* * *

_(*) In the original Theatrical Muse game, the Loki character answered this question (in part) with "...Permanence of any kind implies stagnation...even anarchy can be stagnant. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's lack of change. Everything changes. As an old friend once said, "civilizations rise and fall...". The same goes for my opinion on a monarchy or a democracy. Either, both. Neither permanent. There's a reason these things go through cycles, a reason that eventually a government falls and is replaced, or slowly changes itself from the inside..."_


	11. Movies

_What would your life be, if it were a movie? Comedy, horror, drama sci-fi? And who would play you?_

**Movies!**

If my life was a movie... it would be hideously long. And as fascinating as it would be, mere mortals _aren't_ really capable of sitting through a movie about a life that's lasted five billion years and counting.

But then, no one actually makes biopics anymore. The art of making an entertaining story about someone's life involves picking the right spot to dramatize. So, what kind of movie would my life make? That entirely depends on what part the producers choose to tell.

Something exciting and uplifting? Perhaps they could make a movie about the early days of the Continuum, when the universe was new and we were newer, when omnipotence and nigh-omniscience lay just within our grasp and the possibilities were endless and wondrous. Ah, the excitement of those days! The joy of new discoveries! The fun we had arguing about everything when there was actually some possibility someone might change their mind! It could be a coming of age story or a science fiction tale about the creation of utopia.

Something existentialist and full of nihilistic ennui, a la Waiting for Godot? Make a movie about what the Continuum became. Endless unchanging days, dull silences, arguments conducted more for entertainment in the dusty silences than for any hope of exchanging ideas. See what happens when the people who were most driven, most passionate about learning everything there was to know, growing, changing... can no longer change, can no longer grow, know everything they have deemed meaningful to know. Sartre would look like a positive cheer-monger after you watched _this_ flick.

Perhaps a romantic comedy? Boy and girl have been off again, on again for five billion years. Now boy has developed an interest in a mere mortal! Will girl make a complete fool of herself trying to win boy back? (The answer, by the way, is "yes.")

Perhaps a tragicomedy? A god falls to mere mortality for a day. Will he manage to kill himself out of complete misery, and how many different kinds of fool can he make of himself in the meantime?

Or a war drama about a fellow who's always been disaffected from his society suddenly finding himself at the center of a movement, and then, before he knows it, one of the leaders of the rebels in a civil war? (I kinda fudged that for Kathy since we were fighting for freedom, and also, I figured she'd sympathize with the North, being a damn Yankee and all. Besides it was a good excuse to put her in more attractive clothing.) I think that one gets us back to uplifting.

Right now I think my life is a comedy about a guy who's always done what he wished, when he wished, trying to figure out how to be a father. Without any idea whatsoever as to how to do it. At least I _think_ I'll look back and laugh.


	12. On the Nature of Mu

**This one absolutely takes the cake.**

_What is good and what is evil?_

Mu.

No, I'm serious, this is a total non-question. Rather like asking "what is blorg?" What _is_ blorg, whose frame of reference are you talking about, and besides, who cares?

The group of Earth humans who came from the islands of Japan and studied the philosophy of Zen came up with a great answer for incredibly stupid questions like this. "Mu". It means "your question is too stupid to be answerable." Applied frequently as the answer to such zingers as "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" and "If a tree falls in the forest with no one around, does it make a sound?", mu about sums up my response to this question.

Let us move on to a question that makes sense, shall we?

_Who is your personal role model?_

There was a time in my existence when the answer I'd have had for that one would have been mu as well. But I actually do have an answer now.

By the standards of my favorite linear timeline it was 300 years ago that we locked up Q in a comet for insisting on the right to die (and, not incidentally, accidentally causing considerable havoc in his experiments into transposing mortality onto the Q state. I mean, I'm all for havoc, but not _accidental_ havoc.) He believed-- wrongly, in my opinion-- that the Continuum would inevitably stagnate until we embraced the concept of death, and that some of us would need to die, and that all of us would need to accept the idea of dying someday, before the Continuum could be revitalized. I continue to think he was full of it. I mean, I _have_ been bored enough to contemplate killing myself, but if you're omnipotent there have to be other answers out there. You just have to find them.

So we locked him up in this comet to protect him from himself, and the universe of mortals from him as well, and then my old pal Kathy accidentally let him out, and ended up finagling a position for herself as the judge on the tribunal as to whether or not he should be allowed to die. And she ruled in his favor, and he killed himself.

When the Continuum didn't like what I was doing, they took away my powers, let me think it'd be for the rest of my now vastly shortened existence, and then after giving them back terrorized me with the threat of doing it again every time I tried to stand up to them. When we locked Q in a comet because we didn't like what he was doing, he didn't back down. He continued to believe his beliefs even in prison, he refused to cooperate with offers of parole, he wouldn't compromise his ideals for his personal comfort, and in the end, he won. He defeated us all, and convinced at least me that there _are_ things worth dying for.

I still don't agree with his beliefs. But he was willing to die for them, to endure boredom and suffering and imprisonment for them, to lose his powers for them. We couldn't cow him into toeing the line, we couldn't make him give up his challenge to the status quo. His example inspired me to fight the stagnation that had consumed the Continuum, even when the forces of order came up with guns that could kill us, even when the whole mess exploded into war.

So my role model was Q. Or Quinn, if you must use his mortal name to differentiate him from me (I understand mortals have a problem with that.)


	13. Spending Time

**These are really quite terrible.**

And one wonders why I let this go periodically.

_If you could invent a holiday what would it be?_

See my comments on the human tradition of April Fools' Day. I _have_ invented holidays. They generally involve costumes, humor, trickery, and fun in general-- which is rather a good description of April Fools' Day, actually.

_What constitutes a perfect evening for you?_

You assume that a, I count time by discrete solar entities such as "evenings", and b, I have any one definition of "perfect" for how to spend my time.

_What is a typical day for you?_

Again with that concept of solar time. Or the concept of "typical", which is about as silly as assuming that I have a single notion of perfection.

Let's rephrase, shall we? How do I usually spend my time, and what would I ideally like to do instead?

Nowadays I spend _most_ of my time running around after my son, who is developmentally the equivalent of a human 10-year-old, and putting up with incredibly dull meetings of the Continuum, which, sadly, I can no longer blow off like I did when I was younger. Increased status and power came with a price, it seems.

I would _rather_ spend my time being free and unfettered, involving myself with the Continuum's business or my son only when I feel like it, and in general behaving rather like I did in my younger days, without the part about being constantly harassed by the rest of the Continuum.

Spending it with a certain human starship captain would certainly bring it much closer to my ideal as well...


	14. The End Of The World As We Know It

_The world will end tomorrow. What do you do today?_

**The end of it all**

You know, the ironic thing about this question is that this already happened.

The universe was ending, and my fellows in the Q Continuum decided to throw a really big party. Go out with a bang, so to speak. It was obvious to all and sundry that there was, for all our power, absolutely nothing we could do about it, so why not boogie till dawn?

I, however, was one of only two beings left alive in the Continuum with a personal investment in the future-- I had a son. Who had been sucked into the Maelstrom, the vortex that was eating the universe. (The other such being, my ex, who was still my active mate and companion at the time, had also been sucked in, and I have to admit I was a trifle concerned for her fate as well. But mostly, we assume other Q can take care of themselves; it was my son I was really worried about.) If it had just been me, I probably would have agreed with my fellow Q that there was no point fighting the inevitable, and a party was a splendid way to see off existence. But I had chosen to have a child, and it seems to me that you don't bring a new life into the universe and then let that universe be destroyed before that life has a chance to grow to adulthood.

So I recruited Data and Picard on the grounds that if you need someone to stop the universe from ending, and it's completely hopeless, you may as well get some folks with experience in defeating hopeless odds to help out. Also, if the universe was ending I wasn't going to turn down an opportunity to annoy Picard one last time. :-) (Also, I just happened to run into them. I might not have thought of it if they hadn't needed rescuing from the same phenomenon that ate my family.)

I did find my son, successfully. (And my ex. Although in retrospect, I rather wish she'd stayed lost.) And as you can see, we're all here, so obviously the strategy of trying to stop the impending apocalypse was better than the strategy of having a party (though I hear it was a really _good_ party, and if the stakes hadn't been quite so high, I might regret missing it.) But I think that was my one act of heroism for the aeon; how _do_ mortals (or even immortals) pull off doing this kind of thing all the time? That was hard. And it wasn't actually any fun at all. If it weren't for the fact that it worked I'd say I completely wasted my time.

* * *

_Author's note: Q is referring to the events in the Star Trek novel "I, Q" by John de Lancie and Peter David. Although normally I don't treat novels as canon, the fact that this question precisely addressed the plot of that book made it so I couldn't resist. :-)_


	15. Commitment, and Immortality

**Commitment: being trapped in an insane asylum?**

_How do you view commitment?_

Well, it certainly hasn't escaped my attention that in at least some languages it's a euphemism for being declared out of your gourd and locked up in prison with the rest of the crazy people.

I think that about sums up my view of commitment.

_Would you choose to live forever if you had the choice?_

Well, I'm not dead, am I?

I do have the choice-- so long as I don't choose to end my own life, and so long as peace reigns within my civilization and no one gets the bright idea of shooting me with the guns we invented during our civil war, and so long as I manage not to piss off so many people that they kick me out, again, I probably will live forever. This is a situation I am quite pleased with, I assure you. As dull as immortality can be sometimes, it certainly beats the alternative.


	16. Loss and Regret

_What do you most regret losing?_

**(I can't believe I'm actually willing to admit this.)**

There are many things I've lost, throughout my lengthy existence, and usually, the loss has come with a commensurate gain. For instance, recently I lost a good bit of my free time and became chained down to responsibilities I never used to have to deal with. On the other hand, I gained power and status within my society, and I have a son, who is both simultaneously the most annoying creature in my existence and the best thing that ever happened to me. I lost my innocence and sense of wonder at the universe so long ago I'd practically forgotten I ever had it until I saw it again in my son, but I gained knowledge and power and an understanding of the universe.

I lost friends during the war. Some of them, I killed myself. Others died for the beliefs they shared with me. That's extraordinarily painful-- these are people I've known for billions of years, people I never expected to see die-- but they died for a reason, and I believe the cause was justified. My civilization has a chance to escape stagnation now. I can't regret that.

No, the only thing I've lost and never gained anything by...

...is my ex.

Okay, I said it.

The Q don't have any concept of monogamy (see my comments re commitment) -- we never had a "marriage" as most mortals would understand the term. But we were always there for one another. When things fell apart, when either of us suffered setbacks or losses or just got overwhelmed by chaos, boredom or both, the other one was always there to fall back to. She was my best friend.

I probably should have guessed our relationship was failing when I got kicked out of the Continuum and she didn't so much as drop in to say "hi", or even speak on my behalf. But when the war started up, we came back together again, and I forgave her for abandoning me in my hour of need.

This time, though. The last time she walked out, she told me I was ruining our son, and she was disowning us both, and she wished she'd never had him, he was too much work for too little return and she was sure that if she didn't dump us first, I'd dump her and him and walk because I'd never be able to handle the responsibility.

There are no secrets in the Continuum. My son heard everything she said-- for that matter, a lot of what she didn't say as well-- and, well, I'm an adult Q. If I was going to get hurt because people said mean things to me, I'd be a giant eternal bleeding heart, now wouldn't I? I can take it. But he's young, and he doesn't have the kind of defenses any adult Q does, and she _hurt_ him. Badly.

I still miss her. There's no other Q I've ever been as close to. But I can't forgive what she did to our son. I would _not_ have walked out if she hadn't done it first-- I may not be good at this responsibility thing, but I'm trying. Unlike her. And she had no call to say that I'd ruined him when he isn't even full-grown and when she had as much opportunity as I did to shape him. It's hardly my fault she didn't want to be as involved as I was in raising him.

Perhaps I gained by getting her out of both our lives, if she was going to be like that about it. But it doesn't feel that way. I feel as if I've lost something I never will, in fact, get back, and I didn't get any benefit from it. All it did was hurt the one person I most want to protect from harm. And now I have a hard time remembering my more pleasant memories of my times with her because remembering what she turned out to really be has poisoned them.


	17. Question Bucket: The Revenge

**Yes, yes, I'm so bad.**

I know, I know. I'm supposed to answer these things faster than this. Mea culpa. If you were eternal you'd have trouble keeping track of weeks too.

_What would your dream occupation be?_

Funnily enough, I have it already. I am an advocate of continued change and growth within the Continuum, as well as occasionally a mentor of sorts to mortals. (Admittedly, not the sort of doddering old mentor with the long beard one imagines when one hears that word; I believe I function much more like the really nasty teacher who terrifies everyone in the class and fails more than half of them, but those that survive are _really_ well trained.)

_What makes you jealous and how do you deal with it?_

It's rare for a Q to be jealous. We can have almost anything we want, so what would be the point to envying what others have? The notion of jealousy as associated with monogamy-- that is, the typical "Keep your hands off my woman/man" attitude primitives have-- is virtually alien to us. (I say "virtually" because, of course, there's my ex.)

The one area where I think I understand mortal jealousy-- and understand it well-- is the concept of wanting something (or, more likely, someone) someone _else_ has... and you don't. Yes, I do know how it feels to want a person, and if that person seems to want someone else... yeah, okay. I... admit I don't necessarily deal with that entirely well. Turning people into dogs or putting them to sleep (sleep, not death-- I don't kill mortals for such a trivial reason) has been known to occur to me. Okay, okay, more than occur. As in, I've done it. Happy now?

_What is your weapon of choice?_

Omnipotence.

_Money, fame or happiness, you can only have one... what would you rather have and why?_

Why is stylish good looks and snappy dress not a choice?

_Is there any truth to the saying: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer? Do you have enemies? Do you have more friends than enemies?_

I live in the Q Continuum. When you look up "dysfunctional family" or perhaps "love-hate relationships" in the dictionary, you would see our picture if, of course, it was possible to take a picture of an ineffable concept outside the frame of reference of mortal understanding, which it's not. Imagine being intimately connected to people, so closely you know their every thought, can predict their every move... for five billion years. Yes, I keep my enemies close. And as it happens my friends and my enemies tend to be the exact same people; which they are at any given moment depends on how I and how they feel at the time.

Among mortals I have far more enemies than friends but it's not exactly reciprocal. I perform a test on some pathetic little mortals, they fail, I decide they bore me and move on, they make an entire religion out of hating me. Those enemies, I don't typically _remember_, let alone keep close. But then, my mortal friends aren't all that close either. And a good number of them might also consider themselves my enemies, on occasion. Or, at the very least, they might attempt to kick me off their ship. (I say "attempt", of course. See above as to favorite weapon?)


	18. Afterlife

_Do you believe in an afterlife?_

**Life after life... or not**

For who?

I am a being of pure psionic energy. I am _very_ difficult to destroy. I don't age, I don't get hurt-- something actually has to be actively _trying_ to destroy me to do it.

All mortal sentiences have within them a psionic energy core, a _thing_ that is the essence of their selfness, which is generated by the activity of becoming sentient, but once generated cannot be destroyed any more easily than I can. Mortals-- sentient beings made of matter, especially those made of meat-- can age, and die, because the stuff they are made of is fragile. That core of them, however, is as immortal as I am.

So do mortals have an afterlife? Sure they do. What they do with it, mind, is up to them. It differs from species to species, from individual to individual.

The Q, however, cut out the middle-matter and took our immortal souls straight up. We _are_ our immortal parts. (So are mortals, but since they can't see that part, and since their matter existence is profoundly different from their energy existence, it's understandable that they get confused on the issue.) If I choose to manifest myself in meat, I and everyone I manifest to know it's an affectation, that the "real" me is the psionic part. I hate the term "soul"-- it's so redolent in primitive superstition. But that is, in essence, what I am.

There are ways to destroy one's immortal essence. And if that happens, there isn't anything left to _have_ an afterlife. The Q have always, in the past, conducted executions with mercy-- instead of attempting to destroy a Q essence, we simply enflesh a criminal in meat and cut them off from the Continuum, which makes them mortal, for all intents and purposes, and their essence as a Q will live on the way mortal souls live on after the meat they are in is destroyed.

But during the civil war, we found a way to actually annihilate one another's Q essences. For the first time we brought true death to the Continuum.

So do I get an afterlife? That entirely depends on how I die-- _if_ I die, which I plan not to. If I were made mortal and then killed, yes. If I were killed as a Q... then no. Those of my comrades who died during the war are dead forever.

We can bring mortals back to life. It's easy to reconstruct matter around an existing psionic energy core. But if that core is itself destroyed... well, all the Q's horses and all the Q's men won't be putting _that_ back together again.


	19. Values

_What is the most important value you can pass on to your child?_

**I was supposed to pass _values_ on to my child? No one told me this!**

You mean I've been doing this wrong the whole _time?!_

Values? I don't think I have been passing on any values to my child! Have I? I mean, is "don't blow up the universe, you'll find you'll want it around to play with it later" a value?

I've been doing this all wrong, haven't I? But what was I supposed to be teaching him? I thought training him to use his powers-- and try not to cause untold devastation with them-- was all I needed to do. Was I supposed to be teaching him values too? What kind of values? Because if it's like "respect all life" or "be completely responsible and boring" then I'd just die of hypocrisy, and besides, he's a Q. He knows me far too well to fall for it.


	20. Attack of the Question Bucket

**Lead, follow, or sit around munching popcorn?**

_Would you rather lead or follow? Why? What role do you see yourself playing out over your life, leader or follower?_

Why do I have to be either?

I always saw myself as an iconoclast. Or perhaps a leader in the sense of "fashionable and cool and worth emulating", not in the sense of "When I say jump, you say how high, maggots!" Actually telling people what to do? How tedious. I'd much prefer to stand on the sidelines telling the people who _are_ leaders that they have no clothes on. Certainly I'm not a follower... but now that I have more or less ended up one of the leaders of the Continuum, I find I don't really have any taste for it.

_How do you handle disappointment?_

a. Shrugging and running off to find the next interesting thing.

b. Sulking outrageously.

c. Denial.

d. Making the people who disappointed me confront the Borg.

_Do you confront your problems head on, or ignore them until you have to do something?_

I always _mean_ to confront them. It's not my fault I'm easily distractible.

_Do you consider yourself to be adventurous?_

Yes.

It would be nice if there were adventures left to have... that didn't involve getting shot at, at any rate...


	21. Bride of Question Bucket

I have just spent what feels like several millennia dealing with Continuum politics.

Someone had the brilliant idea that we should implement representative democracy. I mean, really. I posted about the Continuum and democracy earlier, but let me briefly reiterate that the only form of government that works for the Q is full democracy-- _none_ of us will ever be in 100% agreement with anyone we might choose as a representative, and unlike mortals, who will shrug and console themselves with the notion that nobody's perfect and there's too many stupid mortals to make true democracy work, we know better. When a form of government has worked well for five billion years, changing it just for the sake of changing it is downright idiotic.

Wait, did I just say change is bad? Dear me. I _need_ to get out more often. Every time I do this political thing I feel as if more of my true self is slipping away and I'm changing into someone I barely recognize.

**Oh my, time certainly flies when you're not having fun.**

_Who has had the most influence on your life?_

At the risk of swelling his tiny mortal head, Jean-Luc Picard.

Recently, anyway. If I sat around trying to enumerate everyone who has influenced me in my entire existence, and then balanced them against each other, I'd be here for a century or two. However, my life of late has undergone dramatic changes, changes far more sudden and severe than any other change that ever occurred in my life, and the root cause of this, if I trace it back, is that I became interested in humans when Picard defied me at Farpoint. As a result of that, I became an exiled pariah, lost my powers, regained them and my status, ended up leading a movement for change, got shot (not fatally, obviously), had a kid, and became one of the leaders of the Continuum.

I suppose I could also say my son has had an enormous influence on my life, as he has more or less single-handedly changed me into a devil-may-care entity with no responsibilities, free to swashbuckle my way through the universe doing whatever I saw fit, into _shudder_ a DAD. Honestly, I hear myself saying things like "You need to *think* before you act! You can't just do whatever you want!" and have horrific flashbacks to my entire existence of listening to other Q say such things to _me._

_Does heartache make you stronger?_

No, it just makes you depressed.

_If you won the equivalent of $2,000, and had to spend it, what would you spend it on?_

This is an absolutely absurd question for a being of my nature. Next!

_What happened the first time you got drunk?_

Omnipotent beings can't _get_ drunk.

Well, technically I suppose I could get drunk, due to that "omni" in front of the "potent". However, if I did it, either I'd have to put my powers aside, rendering myself vulnerable to whatever indignities mortals might want to commit on my person, or I'd risk the use of my powers while in a state of impaired judgement. It really doesn't seem so terribly attractive as to make it worth it.

I've never needed chemical alterations to be uninhibited anyway.

_What makes you feel vulnerable and what makes you feel invulnerable, and why?_

Immortality and omnipotence help quite a bit with that invulnerable feeling.

Getting shot at by one's own compatriots, however, does introduce a bit of vulnerability.

Hmm. I very much dislike being embarrassed or humiliated. That's a form of vulnerability all Q have, albeit more to other Q than to mortals. I prefer to have the upper hand in my dealings with other Q. That, at least, _is_ one thing becoming a leader has been good for. Most of the outright mockery has stopped.

_What would you place in a personal ad if you were making one?_

Single omnipotent entity, 5,000,000,000, seeks questions that are not abysmally stupid.

_What is the biggest lie you ever told? What were the consequences?_

Consequences? For lying? No one believes me when I tell the _truth_, why would there be consequences for lying?

There are planets where they call me the God of Lies, but that isn't quite accurate. Mostly, I prefer to tell the truth. Just, my version of the truth. For moderate values of truth. Still, I don't think lies have ever gotten me into as much trouble as the truth has.


	22. SisterInLaw Of Question Bucket

I'm not sure why I keep coming back here. I must be bored.

Of course, I'm _always_ bored.

**I grace you with my presence once again.**

_Describe the best 24 hours you ever had._

Why only 24? I've had some fabulous centuries along the way.

I could describe the _worst_ 24 hours I've ever had, but describing the best is quite beyond what I feel like doing.

_Who would you like to see get their final comeuppance? Who is it and just what would you do with them?_

Guinan.

And all I want is for everyone else in the universe to see her for what she truly is, instead of this wise wonderful comfy grandma figure they all seem to project onto her.

_What do you have to be thankful for?_

Quite a few things, when I think about it.

I'm thankful for how things turned out with the war, both the not being dead part and the winning part. I'm thankful things have actually changed in the Continuum. I'm thankful for my son. (When I'm not ready to kill him.)

_What do you want for your birthday?_

I don't have a birthday.

_What are your religious beliefs (and if you are a deity, do you enjoy being worshipped)?_

At last, a question that isn't specifically aimed at mortals! O frabjous day!

_No._ I don't like to be worshipped. Firstly, it entails all kinds of stupid obligations, where if you have worshipers you have to look out for them, and they're always _asking_ for stuff. Make my crops grow, make my husband love me again, all kinds of stupidity. And they _whine._ And they think that burning something they didn't want to eat anyway constitutes a tasty treat for a god. And they totally misinterpret what you try to tell them, so you turn around and all of a sudden they're burning unbelievers in the town square or sacrificing their first-born to you. And you can't tell them who you are and then get a decent conversation out of them-- they're too busy throwing themselves at your feet and chanting "We're not worthy!" Which, of course, they're not, BUT I DON'T NEED TO BE TOLD THIS. If I'm your god, kindly give me some credit for not being stupid.

I don't know why anyone puts up with it. The emotional energy worshippers direct at you is addictive to many godlike entities, but to me it tastes awfully like a sugar overdose. I prefer getting emotional energy with a bit more bite to it.

_Do you believe the possibility of a true friendship between a man and a woman?_

I'm not sure I believe in the possibility of a true friendship between creatures of the _same_ sex.


	23. Opposites

_What would a description of your exact opposite be like?_

Obviously, stultifyingly boring. Rigid, humorless, uptight, full of false modesty, nauseatingly cloying and falsely friendly...

You know, I actually know some Q that fit this description. But typically, that kind of combination of rigidity and overly solicitious concern for what everyone else is doing with their lives is more often found among mortals. Or perhaps Organians.


	24. Far Far Away

_What's the furthest away you've ever been from the place you were born/created? How did you get there? Why did you go? Did you return or even want to come back to where you came from?_

What's the furthest away I've ever been? As far as there is.

I've been to the birth of the universe and to its outermost reaches. I've gone to more universes outside my own than I can easily count. I spend most of my time, in fact, in a dimension that technically is not the one I was born in, though if you want to get really snarky about it we did originally come from here a long long time ago. (In one view of time. In another view, we have always existed in the place where I was born/created/whatever you want to call it,and we always will. Depends on how you look at it.)

But in the end I always come home. Because as stultifyingly boring as it can be, as much as the people there are, quite frankly, asses, as incredibly tedious as the time spent there is... it's _home._ And while I recall expounding at length, once upon a time, about how much I'd be glad to see the back of that place, the one time I thought I was exiled for good was _not_ a pleasant experience.

That's not the real question, though. Distance is irrelevant to the Q. I could go to the end of the universe and it would just be another trip. Another way to interpret the question is to describe the journey of a self. Not the external exploration of stars and planets and wormholes and all that kind of nonsense, because none of that means anything if it doesn't cause your self to move forward on your personal journey away from where/what you were when you were born. This is true of species, it's true of mortals, and it's true of immortals, because immortals that lack a personal journey are so boring they may as well be dead. And in that sense, I think sometimes I'm _very_ far away from who and what I once was. And sometimes I long to return. That's the thing about personal journeys, though; it's not so easy to go back home when "home" is the origin of your selfhood, not an objective place or time.


	25. Everything And Nothing

_What can you say is truly yours?_

I'm not sure I really want to think about this question.

The truth is... nothing, really.

It's the bargain we all make as part of the Continuum. Without the Continuum, we're powerful and difficult to destroy, certainly, but we would neither be as invulnerable as we are nor as nearly omnipotent.

We exchange a part of our individuality for immortality and power. Most of us aren't bothered nearly so much by this as I am, but then, most of us don't have the, shall we say, _interesting_ relations with the rest of the Continuum I have always had

.

I can have almost anything I want, instantly. But I don't actually _have_ anything. Including myself. Everything I have, everything I _am_, is on loan from the Continuum, and they can take it back any time they want.

Which is why it's a good thing that I'm currently one of the people running the joint, but I don't expect that to last forever, or even more than a few dozen millennia.

_What in your life are you most dissatisfied with?_

That is. I'm glad I fought for greater freedom within the Continuum (and rather more glad that I won), but what I really want is to be _free_ of them. To be wholly myself, and not of them, and to interact with the others where and when I choose. And that can't happen. A Q who is not part of the Continuum is crippled, and I wouldn't accept being less than I am, even if it means I must be part of something more than I am.

So I accept it. I am part of the Continuum, and I always will be. I've stopped rebelling against it. But that doesn't mean I'm particularly happy about it.


	26. Stating the Obvious

_If you could change one person's mind about something, who and what would it be?_

I'm tempted to bring up Kathy and my attempt to convince her to have my child, but as it happens, she was my second choice anyway, and the kid I had with Q is working out reasonably well. So naah.

No, I'll go for the obvious. If I could change one person's mind about something, I would convince Jean-Luc Picard that...

...that what? That he should trust me? He shouldn't, and I'd think less of him if he did. That I'm not his enemy? I think he already knows.

Maybe, that when I said he was the closest thing I had to a friend, I actually meant it.

Maybe, that a human who became a Q wouldn't have to become corrupted by power like Riker did.

Maybe, that I...

Maybe that I talk too much. Some things, I'll keep to myself, thank you very much.


	27. Scary Stories

_If you could do one totally irresponsible or even bad thing with absolutely no consequences, what would it be and why?_

Just _one?_ My whole _life_ used to be like that.

Which leads me into my next topic.

_What is the scariest thing that has ever happened to you?_

They say that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? But then, they never probably had to deal with losing friends and family, becoming crippled and blind, and facing death, all in the same day. I mean, if they _had_, and they still think it makes you stronger... well, they're idiots. Wiser, maybe. More cautious? Definitely. But stronger? No, I can pretty much declare that I was _stronger_ before it happened.

I am, of course, talking about the single day I was human.

**Why being human is the SCARIEST THING EVER**

At this point I know the humans reading this are going to snicker to themselves... which is pretty much what the humans I was surrounded with did. "What's so scary about being human?" humans think. "I do it every day!" Which is great, yippee for you. You've never known anything better. And you've grown up with the knowledge that you can die. Actually facing it, right in front of you, scares most of you out of your shorts, true, but at least the _possibility_ has always been in your mind.

The Q are immortal, invulnerable, and as close to omnipotent as makes no real difference. We can do anything we want as long as the rest of the Q Continuum has not forbidden it. Over the aeons, the laundry list of things the rest of the Q Continuum has forbidden got longer and longer, and being the great fan of stultifying order and strait-jacketing authority that I am, this annoyed me. Considerably. So I spent, oh, pretty much _all_ my time skating around the limits of what I was allowed to do. Which is why my entire life used to be full of wonderfully irresponsible or even bad activities with absolutely no bad consequences, or consequences that consisted of me listening to a lecture, wising off at the lecturer, and going on my merry way. And even after some friends of mine were executed for flagrantly disobeying an order from the Continuum, I still figured that nothing bad would ever happen to _me._ After all, I wasn't actually disobeying orders. Just... interpreting them creatively. I had a clever rationalization for why it was absolutely necessary to do everything I did, but the truth is, I mostly did it for fun. I was _supposed_ to be making contact with different species and testing them on a number of points, such as, are they total hypocrites and are they primitive enough to worship a godlike being like me and do they have potential to be better than they are and stuff like that. And, well, I did do that. Creatively. Which is to say I went out of my way to find the most obnoxious way I could carry out my tests possible, because it's enormously fun to watch people squirm in terror.

I hear you say, "Good Gad, a loathesome lad you are!" Or words to that effect, with apologies to Cole Porter. In my defense, I didn't understand fear. I'd never experienced it, you see. Due to that "immortal and invulnerable" thing mentioned above. Oh, I could read people's minds and _see_ their fear, but I couldn't _feel_ it, so I couldn't really comprehend it. Knowledge is not the same as understanding.

So I went around terrorizing lower life forms, creatively, until the Continuum dropped the hammer on me. They declared that I had showed myself to be incorrigible. That I had been repeatedly warned, and repeatedly flouted their authority. And because of this they declared that I was not responsible enough to wield the powers of the Q. Now, you can't be a Q and not be nigh-omnipotent, it doesn't work that way. Therefore I could not be a Q, and they had to make me into something else. So they sentenced me to become mortal.

At the time, I think I'd rather have been executed. More dignified, and the end result would be the same, I thought. But they weren't going to do that, and I wasn't suicidal enough to force the issue, so I took the deal they offered. Choose any mortal species to be, and any place in the universe to go.

This sounds like a wide spectrum of choices. It's not. I couldn't be an energy being, the closest thing to what the Q are, because they're not considered mortal. It's not enough that something _can_ be killed, it has to be on a countdown to automatic death. Something that ages and decays. I didn't _want_ to be non-sentient, because the integrity of my selfhood is very important to me, and I wouldn't be able to carry my memories or selfhood into a non-sentient's brain without the power of the Continuum to back me up. I needed to become a mortal of a species I was familiar with personally and recently, because no mortal mind can hold all the memories of five billion years and I'd have to give up all but the most recent and important ones. And since I'd never studied how to _survive_ as any mortal species I'd tested, I needed mortals who'd teach me how to fit in. Also, who wouldn't kill me. Because running around the galaxy terrorizing people does not make you friends. In fact, mortals who would protect me from _other_ mortals (or for that matter immortals) who wanted me dead for what I'd done to them would be the best.

I picked humans, and I picked the starship _Enterprise_, run by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, because at that time humanity considered one of its defining characteristics to be compassion, mercy and willingness to forgive. They'd made friends with several species of former dire enemies. And Picard himself was an exemplar of humanity. I used him in my tests because he _passed_ the first one, which, among other things, was to see how close to the ideals of humanity a sample human actually kept. And because the first test revealed that he was, in fact, compassionate, merciful, and willing to forgive, and the next test revealed the ethical strength to not misuse power. (Okay, it was actually Riker who turned down being omnipotent, but he did it because Picard wanted him to.)

So here I am, on the bridge of their ship, in the human body I'd always worn when visiting them, only now it was really me and I couldn't just keep it going with energy drawn from the Continuum, I'd actually have to feed it and things like that. Picture this: you've been exiled from your entire species, most of your senses have been shut down and you feel blind and deaf, most of your abilities have been stripped away, leaving you crippled, you're naked and cold and you know that someday you will die and it might even be soon, whereas before you'd never imagined the possibility. And these people, these exemplars you've turned to for compassion and guidance, are yammering on about how you have to wear clothes, and making you wear THE UGLIEST OUTFIT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, and accusing you of all kinds of stupid things, like making a moon fall out of a planet's sky. And you tell them the truth. And they don't believe you. Despite the fact that some voyeuristic, prying emotion-reader declares to the entire room that you're _terrified._ Thanks, Troi, I wasn't humiliated enough up to that point. Did I mention that, up to this point, boredom was the absolute worst thing I'd ever encountered? So Picard promptly threw me in the brig, where I could be terrified _and_ bored, at the same time. How nifty.

I managed to talk him into letting me go (after enduring the absolute terror of feeling my BRAIN SHUT DOWN and the energy leach out of my body, which I thought was me dying, only it turned out I was falling asleep, which meant I was going to have to go through this _every night_ for the rest of my now-vastly-shorter existence), because he had a physics problem on his hands, and I know physics intimately. The only trouble was, I didn't know enough about their primitive technology to know what aspects of practical physics they could do, and what they couldn't. And then my back locked up on me, which was the most painful thing I have ever encountered, which is to say, since I had never suffered pain before that day, the most painful thing I'd encountered that day. So I couldn't focus, and I gave them the easy answer. If a black hole is yanking a moon out of orbit, change the local gravitational constant of the universe to disrupt the pull. Probably I should have guessed that was something they couldn't do, but hello? Pain? I couldn't think of anything better, due to the fact that I literally couldn't think. It was as if part of my mind was trying to think through the problem and the rest of it was shouting "OW OW BACK HURTING OW OW" so loudly that I couldn't hear myself. This, of course, convinced them that not only was I making a really ineffective human, but that I was an idiot and should be given trained monkey jobs.

As if I was not having enough fun by this point, this body decided that now would be a good time to get fed, so Data took me to get something to eat. One of those aforementioned enemies who'd be seriously ticked off with me? Ran the restaurant where the food was. Imagine the person you would _least_ like to be vulnerable in front of. Now imagine that you're blind, crippled and utterly humiliated and there they are, gloating at you and telling you you'll never survive unless you learn to beg. Oh, and stabbing you in the hand with a fork. That was fun. No, it wasn't, I'm lying. It wasn't as bad as the back thing, but it was the first time anyone had committed _violence_ on me, which reminded me that actually anyone who didn't like me could do the same thing, and there's no shortage of people who don't like me in the universe.

And then the point was proved when the Calamarain, who despite being a plasma cloud race are actually a lot more dull than you'd think, showed up and tried to kill me for the crime of attempting to make them just a tiny bit less boring. Let me repeat. TRIED TO KILL ME. I mean, I knew people might try to kill me, but that's nothing at all like having it actually happen. Strangely, the Calamarain attack was actually less painful than the back thing-- it mostly felt like small electrical insects were crawling over my entire body and delivering thousands of tiny shocks, which sounds worse than it felt-- but when it was over, my muscles gave out on me completely. I felt drained, and weak, and I could barely move, and I realized that _this_ was what having the life ooze out of you felt like, which might have reassured me about the safety of going to sleep, except I was too busy being terrified. While it was happening I didn't fully comprehend that the Calamarain attack was killing me-- hurting me, yes, but not being experienced with the dying thing, I didn't really know what was happening. It was after it was over, and I collapsed, and I realized that I couldn't move and the world was spinning and mostly all I could see was gray dots dancing in front of me and nothing to either side and there was a whooshing in my ears that was so loud I couldn't hear anything else, that I realized I was dying.

I called for help. Data brought me to Sickbay. Guinan, on the other hand, stood over my prone body and gloated. And this is the woman Picard thinks is so wise and wonderful. Someday I would dearly love to show him what she really is.

So here I am, having survived a murderous attack, and instead of giving me any sympathy or realizing what it might be like to face death for the first time in your very existence, the _Enterprise_ crew entertained a serious discussion of handing me over to the Calamarain, or at least dumping me on some forlorn starbase where I wouldn't know anybody, because I wasn't lonely and frightened and feeling abandoned enough yet by having my entire _species_ kick me out. Data managed to persuade them that I could be useful enough to keep around. Did I mention I'm extremely fond of Data? This kind of thing is why. So we go to Engineering, to fix the moon thing, but they don't listen to any of _my_ ideas, due to that little mistake about the gravitational constant. They _could_ have cut me some slack for one little mistake while I was experiencing pain for the first time, but nooo. LaForge gave me a job a trained monkey could do, and then yelled at me for not being good at it. Hello, would you be good at a job that only used a fraction of a percent of your intellect? I bet not. You'd be too bored to be good at it.

And then the Calamarain attacked me, again. _This_ time, I was paralyzed _during_ the attack, and then they dragged me several meters off the floor. I don't know, maybe they intended to drop me in the warp core, or zap me to death, or something. Data grabbed me, and it turns out that positronic neural networks are actually _more_ sensitive to the kind of disruptions the Calamarain caused than human neural tissue is. I ended up badly bruised from falling two meters to the floor after they stopped the attack; Data ended up nearly dead.

I know that the universe is spectacularly unfair. I know that, in general, altruists suffer more than the selfish do. I know that there's no parity, no karma, no outside forces that punish the guilty and reward the worthy. And normally this didn't bother me. But perhaps there's something built into the human brain that demands such fairness, affecting me, because it occurred to me, as I watched LaForge and Crusher trying to fix Data, that it was really unfair for a being who could, potentially, live forever (well, maybe not forever, but an extremely long time), being snuffed out so casually to protect a being who was going to manage 80 more years, tops. Or for a person who'd gone out of his way to help someone in need dying to protect a person who had spent several million years annoying people for fun. Or for someone who liked his life and was well adapted to it dying to save someone who simply couldn't stand living like this.

The truth was, I didn't actually want to die. But it was going to happen anyway-- because of this moon thing, the Enterprise actually _couldn't_ protect me. Every time they lowered their shields so they could push the moon, the Calamarain would attack. So, let's see. Millions of people on the planet die. Or, the entire ship full of people, including me, die _and_ maybe the millions of people on the planet. Or, me alone. And I wasn't a Q anymore; there was no good reason why I would be more special, more deserving of life, than any of those other people. If I was still a Q, yes, my life would have been significantly more important than theirs. But not if I was as mortal and as powerless as they were.

So I stole a shuttlecraft and went out to sacrifice myself to the Calamarain, consoling myself with the thought that at least I wouldn't have to suffer the horrible tedium and physical pain that it seemed human life was all about, and I'm sitting there in this shuttlecraft, wondering how much it's going to hurt when I die, when Q shows up and tells me my act of selflessness has earned me my place in the Continuum again, at least provisionally. Okay, first he tells me he got me kicked out of the Continuum in the first place, which, considering that I always thought he was one of my closest friends, was not what I wanted to hear. _Then_ he told me I was reinstated. And thus ended my Day From Hell.

The truth is? It never ended. Having faced death once, I was always aware that it was a possibility again. And for years, I stayed scared. Colored in the lines, dotted the i's, agreed to test my previously executed friends' daughter and kill her if she couldn't control her powers, agreed to conduct really stupid tests because the Continuum demanded it, that kind of thing. It wasn't until another Q killed himself to promote his beliefs about reforming the Continuum that I got back enough of my courage to challenge my superiors again. Which started a war, but that's a different story.


	28. Introspection

_Describe what your "happily ever after" would be like._

This isn't a hypothetical question for someone who will probably live forever, you realize.

There is no such thing as eternal happiness, unless you are really, really boring. By definition, happiness is the state of being content with life, of having everything you want for a particular moment in time. But life is about striving for change, for personal betterment, for knowledge and power and I don't know, just having something _different_ around. If you must always want things to change or suffer boredom (which would make you unhappy), then you cannot be eternally happy. You must frequently suffer discontent, pursuing things you don't have yet, wanting and striving.

So "happily ever after" is a contradiction. But to come close to it, one would have a life where there are constantly new things to do, new ideas to learn, new places to explore. Where one would have a base, where one feels safe and secure, and one would frequently venture out from that base to experience new things. Where there are companions to enjoy the new things with, but they don't control or impede one's ability to explore.

I have news for would-be immortals. It's like that for the first two billion years or so. Then the ennui starts to set in. Because once you have explored everywhere, seen everything, learned everything, done everything... what else is there?

"Happily ever after" is not possible.

_What does the word 'love' mean to you? _

Love. Ah, what a useless term. Redolent in so many connotations and implications it's become almost meaningless. Are we talking about platonic love, the love of a friend or companion? Romantic love, the love for a person you want to have sex with? Parental love, the love for a child? Agape, eros, what?

By some definitions one might have to say I love the Continuum, and as soon as you've said _that_ you've made the word useless, because my feelings toward the Continuum are so complicated they may as well cancel each other out. I think I can say with reasonable accuracy that I love my son, but he's also the source of most of the stress in my life lately. Perhaps that's always true of what people love. In that case, the excessive lionization of the emotion that poets commit is foolish. Love is the source of as much pain as it is joy.

_Have you ever regretted a wish you made? Why/what happened?_

Yeah. I wanted to have a kid. And I regret that _constantly._

Of course, I think I would also regret not having had the kid. I miss my old life, my old self, but I wouldn't be much of an avatar of change if I wasn't willing to embrace change in my own life.

The thing about regrets is that there is no point to them if you are, overall, satisfied with your life. If you did things differently you'd be a different person now, and if the person you are now appeals to you, why regret the steps you took to become that person?

_What is so important to you that without it, life would not be worth living? Why?_

This is an interesting question. Since I have, in fact, been in a situation where I thought life was not worth living, I think I can answer this one... though I'm not sure the answer is exactly coming out the way I expected.

My first, and rather glib, reply was to say my powers, of course. But when I was stripped of my powers, it wasn't the loss of my powers per se that led me to try to kill myself. I was, at first, committed to at least _trying_ to endure my new life. Then I found out that my enemies were going to get me no matter what, and the obvious solution to the problem "What's better, the death of one person or the death of that same person plus lots of others" is the first. Even as stupid as I was as a human, I could do that math. But I don't think I'd have let myself realize how hopeless my situation was if I'd really wanted to live. I would have rationalized, or pretended that I believed Picard and his crew could solve the problem and still keep me alive.

What made me realize that there was no point to my existence was that I belonged to nothing. No one cared about me. If I died, I thought, no one would miss me. The group that I'd used to belong to, the one I'd raged against and declared frequently that I wanted to be left alone by... they'd thrown me out. They didn't care any more. And the group I was trying to join didn't _want_ me. And they never would, because I was morally inferior to them by their own standards. The Q Continuum had declared I wasn't worthy to be a Q, by Q standards, and everything the humans said and did showed they believed I wasn't worthy to be a human by human standards.

I like to think of myself as self-sufficient. A universe unto myself. I don't need friends, I don't need people to _like_ me, I am thoroughly unhampered by any such weak emotional needs. But it's a lie, and I know now that it's a lie. As much as I hate it, I need to belong to something. As much as I want to be a law unto myself, I need to be seen by _someone_ besides myself as meeting their criteria for someone worth existing. If no one cares about me at all, if no one particularly wants me to live, if no one sees any value in me at all... then my life is not worth living.

You know, I really hate that answer. It would suit me a lot better to be able to say "my powers" or, perhaps, "something to entertain me". But I was willing to live through the loss of my powers; I was willing to live through boredom. Believing that my existence was of no value to anyone besides myself was what made me want to kill myself.


	29. Fries With That Question Bucket?

So I come back after several decades of your time spent trying to teach my boy how to teleport, and find that in my absence I was invited to a party. And that unfortunately during that party I was, in fact, present in this universe, and I can't actually be in the universe at two different moments without a lot more effort than I want to go through for a party thrown by mortals... and now I feel so damn old. I missed a party because I was with my kid. Goddamnit, I'm a soccer dad. This was not what I pictured when I planned to shake up the Continuum by having a child...

Anyway.

**Catchup: it's not just a vegetable.**

_What is your most treasured possession and why?_

My powers. Inasmuch as I have possessions at all.

_If you could trade lives with one person for a day, who would it be, and what would you do?_

Trade lives? Why ever would I want to do that? My life may not be perfect, true, but it's a far sight better than anyone else's pathetic little life.

_What is your worst character flaw?_

I am too generous and forgiving.

_Which are you more afraid of: Being too gullible and believing things that aren't true, or being too skeptical and missing out on something important?_

I'm a Q. If I miss out on learning something important, well, all of time and space is my playground, so sooner or later I'll get to it. If I believe something that's not true, however, the other Q will laugh at me. So my priorities are pretty clear.

_If you could only carry one memory with you into the afterlife, which would you choose?_

Again with the mortal-centric questions! I don't _get_ an afterlife. My people chose to take our afterlives while we were still alive, which is to say, we are immortal and indestructible, except when we shoot each other, at which point we are eternally dead.


	30. Trout

_If you could meet any famous personality, living or dead, and smack them in the head with a large trout, who would it be?_

I have to pick just _one?_

I did once smack M'thaa of Anteron in the cranial carapace with a _tubat_, which is more like a crab than a trout, except that it has an endoskeleton instead of an exoskeleton and its skin is soft and squishy. Really, he was asking for it. M'thaa, I mean, not the _tubat._

_When in your life did you feel the most alone?_

After one of my best friends tried to murder me and I spent forty years in solitary, sensory deprivation, recuperating. My people put me there because in my weakened, damaged state, I wouldn't have been able to protect myself from unscrupulous other Q who might want to forcibly alter my mind and personality (I was famed for my charm even then. :-)) It was the right thing to do, but I came very close to going insane. I could hear the Continuum, distantly, but I couldn't communicate back -- no matter how loudly I called, no one could hear me.

I was pretty damn lonely when I lost my powers, too, especially when Picard threw me in the brig, but that was a day, not forty years, and I was mostly surrounded by people, just people who didn't like me very much. And considering that they didn't like me all that much in the Continuum either back then, I didn't see much difference.


	31. And speaking of trout

I am letting the stress get to me entirely too much. It is ridiculous that I should get upset over a mere mortal's opinion of me, as ignorant and ludicrous as that opinion may be. Particularly since it's not as if I went out of my way to present myself in a friendly and positive light to this person, who is, after all, an idiotic and limited creature. And a voyeur. But... things haven't exactly been going well for me lately.

See, it all started when my kid blew up a solar system. Again. For the third time. And this one was inhabited. When you're a Q, "oops" does not cut it as the excuse for the _third_ time you did something. And being as that it is a _royal_ pain in the proverbial derriere to put an _inhabited_ solar system back together -- you can't just re-assemble it, you have to roll back time and grab all the beings that lived there before they got fried and pull them forward to after you reassembled their world, and then erase their memories if they were sentient enough to have memories, and all that -- I was not happy with this little stunt at all. So I confined him to the Continuum, as I can't stick him in a black hole any more now that he can manipulate the gravitational constant with the best of them.

So he made matters much worse.

The Continuum is dull for us adults. For a child, who has no other children close to his own age, it's mind-numbingly awful. I intended this to be a punishment, after all. But q decided that, since he had nothing better to do in the Continuum, he would explore to the edge and see what was on the other side. This is not something I ever forbade him to do, for the simple reason that it's so incredibly stupid that in all the years the Continuum has existed, not one of us has ever thought of it. This is the problem with having kids for the first time, see. They think of things that are so stupid, it has never entered an adult's mind to do them.

The Continuum exists as a bubble within a realm of infinite energy. Poke a hole in that bubble to see what's on the other side, and the consequences will not be nice. All Q knew immediately when the wall was breached; I also knew that my son was next to it when it blew, because I'm always at least dimly aware of his whereabouts. So I showed up first, dove into the energy stream to rescue my idiot kid, and then, since by then other Q had shown up to heal the breach, I concentrated on healing my boy (the raw energy outside the Continuum acts on Q the way, say, electricity works on humans; we require the stuff in a controlled and orderly form, but raw, it can burn us). This earned me the wrath of my fellow Q, who felt that I should be concentrating on containing the breach, due to the fact that if the energy had continued to pour into the Continuum and the hole had widened we could have been looking at the destruction of the entire Continuum. Of course, I didn't _need_ to help, they just think I should have. Because, you know, it is more important to assist half a dozen other Q in their task than to do the job _none_ of them are doing. If I'd been alone, yes, I would have concentrated on saving the Continuum, but I wasn't alone, and since other able-bodied Q were on that job, I thought it was rather important to SAVE MY SON'S LIFE. Even if he is an idiot. I think the others would have preferred I let the kid die. We're not exactly the most, shall we say, parental race ever.

I took him out of the Continuum to finish healing, since being in the Continuum after raw Continuum energy burned you would be kind of like hanging out in San Francisco Spaceport or the Ferengi Trade Exchange when you just went temporarily deaf from an explosion. He needed to be _away_ from the kind of energy that harmed him, even in its channeled form. Also, I did not feel like listening to the endless harping about what a terrible Q I've become since becoming a father. And what a rotten boy I have. So I'm stuck here in the material universe, playing nursemaid to this brat when what I really want is to whup his butt seven ways from Sunday for pulling this moronic stunt, but I can't very well do that since he got badly hurt.

And so I'm here, bored out of my mind, with no one for company but this whiny, sulky, needy idiot, being chewed a new one by my fellow Q for, you know, being a dad, healing up from my own injuries (grabbing a small Q out of a stream of raw energy from the outside of the Continuum isn't exactly risk-free even for an adult) and then I find out that Deanna Troi wants to whack me with a fish. For being childish and irresponsible, no less. Because, see, it's All About Her And Her Pals. The concept that I have a life of my own doesn't seem to have entered her tiny little brain.

But why is this upsetting me? It's not like I went out of my way to reveal myself to Troi as having deep layers, or anything. For one thing, doing that would reveal a certain level of emotional weakness, and given that this is a woman who reveals other people's emotional weaknesses, in public, as a _PROFESSION_, and not only engages in this highly unethical activity but doesn't even seem to recognize that it _is_ unethical (you know, I may indulge myself in tormenting lesser species a bit, but it's not as if I don't _know_ it's a vice), I am certainly not going to display any emotional weaknesses to _her._ And if Picard hasn't felt like telling her about the private interactions he and I have had that _are_ on a rather more rarified level than "ha ha, you stupid humans", well, I'm certainly not going to spill the beans. And I used to positively revel in being seen as a bad boy. I mean, in the old days, if a mortal said "I want to slap Q with a dead fish" my reaction would have been "What? Only a dead fish? I must be slipping!"

It's just the contrast that's pissing me off, I think. Being told I am childish and irresponsible, by a mind-raping voyeur with a fetish for publicly humiliating others, when I'm sitting here nursing a burned little boy... well, come on, I think anyone would be just a tad torqued.


	32. Ineffable, Glorious, and BORING

_Describe the place you grew up._

Oh, how can I even begin?

**The Q Continuum in a nutshell. A very large, multiverse-spanning nutshell.**

I came into existence in a place called the Q Continuum, a limitless dimension beyond the multiverse full of infinite energy. As you might possibly guess, "infinite energy" ordinarily would result in infinite chaos, but the Continuum is the unity of mind of all the Q (the name of our species. Also, the name each of us go by when we talk to mortals, or to anyone who isn't a Q, really. We don't need names with each other; after all, we know who we are.) With each of us linked together, sharing in a sort of super-mind, we are able to control, contain, and channel infinite energy in accordance with our will and our knowledge.

When I was created, the Continuum already existed; pioneers before my generation had created it, and having created it, created us to share in it. We were not angels, created by an all-powerful God to do His bidding and reflect His glory; we were children, created to assist our parents in the family business, which was the process of learning everything. These early pioneers were certainly puissant, and knowledgeable, but they were far from all-powerful and far from omniscient. They wanted to be, and that's where we came in. The rest of the Q were created by these pioneers as, well, teenagers -- we were fully sentient, had the full adult intelligence of one of our elders and the full power in theory, but we didn't know how to use it as well as they did. We were naive, and hungry to learn.

My first personal memory, in fact, is of my creators showing me how to expand my senses, to touch the outer limits of the Continuum, to sense the vastness of the multiverse beyond it. And their words were "All of this is for you to explore."

(To be honest, I have to say that that _totally_ beats out "It's a boy" as the first thing said about a newborn sentient being. And as a phrase of creation, I like it a lot better than "Let there be light." Or "Go forth and multiply", for that matter.)

We were created to explore, and we did. We roamed the multiverse, studying, exploring, recording everything we perceived and sending it back to the Continuum. There, other Q, my cousins if you will, were taking the knowledge we explorers sent back, analyzing it, classifying it, storing it, making it available to all other Q to access at will. So anything we learned, the totality of the Q Continuum soon knew, and with many Q and many, many, _many_ years to explore in, we learned... everything. Over three billion years or so, we mapped the universe we originated from, gathered a great deal of information about the rest of the universes in the multiverse, and learned how to use our powers to do absolutely anything we wished.

Except, of course, for the things that our cousins decided we weren't supposed to do. Because, see, while we were off exploring the universe, the Q we left behind in the Continuum got to be real good pals with each other. And because power in the Continuum is directly related to the connections between Q, the ones who stayed behind ended up running everything. And because they were sooo good at analyzing the knowledge we sent back to them, they decided that we were too _close_ to our subjects, too tainted by our involvement in the material universe, and that _they_ knew better than us how the Continuum should work. So we learned everything there was to know, and came home to find that we weren't equals any more. They had taken the omniscience _we_ gave them, and decreed that they should have control over us.

The Continuum was never supposed to be us and them. In those first glorious years when the universe was new and we were newer, when there was still so much to learn, so much to see, we were all equals. Even our parents, over time, were equals. You can't be part of the family business for three billion years without Mom and Dad eventually recognizing that you've grown up, after all. We were a unity of mind, a Continuum, a joint project with a single goal held in all our individual minds and hearts. And then they became closer to each other than any of us were to them, or to each other for that matter; we were off exploring the galaxy and they were having coffee-klatsches and getting to be best buds with each other. And that was how the fracture started.

Nowhere left to explore. Nothing left to learn. The one thing in the universe that constantly renews itself, that changes all the time, was mortal sentience (and believe me, even that gets _really_ repetitive after a while), but they told us to hold ourselves aloof from mortals. Test them if we liked. Study them. Help them move forward in their evolution. Tease 'em a little if it kept us entertained, anything to keep us from coming home and raising holy hell about how we were being treated. But don't live among them as one of them, don't care about them as more than a fun hobby, and for the sake of all that's eternal, don't love them. Or we'll throw you out of the Continuum. Which, of course, will strip away your power, your knowledge and your immortality, for all intents and purposes killing you. Did we mention we're going to do that to anyone who does things we don't like?

So. Glorious, ineffable, the source of omnipotence and omniscience, infinite, eternal, and BORING AS MUD. No, I take it back, mud occasionally flows with the rain and changes shape. The Continuum refused to. My beautiful home became a prison, my loving siblings became my jailers, my own power a monkey trap I couldn't escape, because I couldn't give up the power but to keep it I had to sacrifice my autonomy to people I was beginning to despise.

And then I fought a war, and everything changed. But that's another story.


	33. Pride and Joy

_At what moment in your life did you feel most proud?_

The first time my son drew on the power of the Continuum without help. He was trying to turn a blob of mud into _dremoullin_, a snack cake favored by the Tartatsin which tastes rather like a chocolate cupcake laced with oregano. A rather ridiculous thing to be trying to achieve, I admit, but the point isn't what he was trying to do, the point is that he _did_ it, without my help or the aid of any other adult Q.

I suppose the equivalent for a mortal humanoid might be when your kid first walks, or first picks up blocks and stacks them, or something like that. Except, of course, that mortal humanoids are almost never the first parents their species has ever seen, so the nifty things their kids do just confirm that their children aren't defective. Everything my son does is something no Q has ever done before, because no Q has ever been a child before. So when I see him accomplish something normally only an adult Q could do, it's the most amazing thing I have ever seen... because it's new, and because _I_ have created this newness. After five billion years of existence, I never thought I'd see something new again, let alone create it.

_What is the biggest obstacle you have overcome in your existance?_

I probably should say something funny here about overcoming the stupidity of others or the stultifying boredom of the Continuum or something like that, but to be honest, I'm not in the mood.

The biggest obstacle I have overcome in my existence is my own nature. I'm a Q. We are not, by nature, kind, gentle, loving or patient. We expect our fellows to be our equals, and those who are not our equals are our inferiors. We are proud, domineering, and self-sufficient. The idea that we could learn from an inferior creature like a mortal is utterly alien to us. And yet, if I hadn't been willing to learn from my study of humanity, I would never have achieved either of my greatest accomplishments in life-- the dismantling of the old, calcified structure of the Continuum to make room for the freedoms I've been fighting for for millions of years, or the creation of my son. And if I had not been willing to bend down and reach out to something far less powerful and knowledgeable than me, to help such a being rise to my level instead of punishing them for being stupid, I would never have managed to be a halfway decent father. (Of course the jury is perhaps out on whether I qualify for "halfway decent" in that regard...)


	34. Betrayal

_Talk about a time you realized that someone close to you was not the person you thought you knew._

This only has to happen oh, about several dozen times or so, before you start to expect it. _Nobody_ I know is who I think they are, and why should they be? I'm not who they think I am either. And if I really knew them all that well, they would bore me to tears, so it's just as well. But there have been some times that stand out particularly in my mind.

I had a good friend, see. A pal. A mentor. A guy who had more or less elected himself my "older brother" (technically, he is indeed older than me, but what's twenty million years give or take?), who'd been, millennia ago, my partner in crime. And who more or less decided that he was going to join forces with Society. (Which, frighteningly enough, means he did the same thing I've recently done, only earlier than me, which means we are more alike than I ever admitted. That's a trifle disturbing.)

It was something of a blow to lose him to the forces of respectability, of course, but hey, I've never needed a sidekick to have a good time. And I thought that of all my people, he was the one who best understood me, the most sympathetic to me, the guy who I could turn to when the rest of the Continuum was acting as if I were a strange and inferior alien life form.

Then he got me kicked out of the Continuum.

See, I knew something was being plotted behind my back. And I knew he was involved. But I figured, he's my buddy. My big brother. He has my back. So when they told me I was being exiled to mere mortality, I figured that at the very least he'd stood up for me. I knew I was alone and the Continuum had ruled against me, but at least I believed I still had friends in high places.

Then he told me he was the guy who got me kicked out in the first place.

He gave me my powers back shortly after that. And I know, it was a last-minute intervention to try to save my life, because people in the Continuum who really, truly did _not_ understand me, or want to, were maneuvering to have me killed if I wouldn't toe the line. And I know, he meant well. And I know, when the chips are down and it's *not* because he's manipulating me, that I can trust him. And he fought by my side in the war.

But, you know, I've never really considered him all that close a friend ever since.

And then there's my ex. Who, I always knew, was more staid and more "respectable" and less willing to push the boundaries than I was. But she had her own wildness to her, she had the things she'd push her luck with, she had things she liked to do that no one else (including, I admit, me) understood, and we had that in common. I thought I knew that deep down, she was like me.

And, okay, I admit: I could have been the first one to walk out. I have been, many times. (Newsflash: no such thing as eternal love. The best you get is, after you've been broken up for a hundred thousand years you decide to get back together.) And I admit, I have not always been the most responsible of entities. But part of the reason I dislike being worshipped is that I don't like having anyone depend on me, because I feel horrible if I let people who depend on me down. Better not to be trusted in the first place than to betray a trust. And she did that.

She walked out, not on me-- I can handle that-- but on our son.

I never saw that coming. And I'll never forgive it, either.


	35. Betrayal, Revisited

_Most people wish that I... _

...would go away and leave them alone.

I don't know why. I'm a funny, entertaining guy. An entity could get a complex from this kind of thing, you know.

_What is the one thing about yourself that you don't want anyone ever to know? _

Oh great and glorious creators of questions for this place, answer me one question: if I didn't want anyone to ever know something about myself, WHY WOULD I TELL YOU?

_If you could find out one single fact about every person you met, what fact would you want to know, and why? _

I already can find out rather more than one single fact about every person I meet. And whenever I meet someone, the first fact I find out about them is: are they worth my time?

I mean, I might be immortal, but I'm _still_ never going to get back those ten minutes spent in the company of Z'oodra Lugorg. Or the day or so I spent on testing William Riker.

_Have you ever experienced something you couldnt explain? Write down your brushes with the mysterious. _

I know everything. Therefore, no, I've never experienced anything I couldn't eventually explain.

_Have you ever betrayed someone's confidence? Has anyone ever betrayed you?_

The thing about betraying someone else is, they have to have trusted you in the first place before you can betray them.

**How to avoid betraying anyone, and still be completely hedonistic, impulsive and irresponsible**

I have, I admit, occasionally flaked out on something I promised to do for somebody, whether it be a fellow Q or a mortal. Once in a while I've even forgotten something I promised a mortal until after they were dead, which is why it's helpful that I can travel in time when I feel it warrants it. But I suspect that pretty much everyone I ever promised anyone where I didn't follow through didn't expect much different from me. I make sure to establish a rep, see.

The Q tend to be worshipped as gods. When I was much younger, I thought that was rather funny, actually, and I used to enjoy showing up and getting entire populations of sheeplike primitive mortals to abase themselves before me. But then I discovered that mortals are entirely self-serving in their worship. They don't sing hymns to your name for _your_ sake but for their own. And they will, without thinking twice about it, do completely the opposite of whatever you told them to do, while claiming it is your will.

After I left a bunch of mortals thinking I was a god of fun and parties, and came back five hundred years later to find them sacrificing small children in my name, I decided that I really, really didn't want anyone worshipping me. And the thing is, if you let mortals think you are reliable and helpful and they can trust you, they _will_ worship you. And then they'll start relying on you instead of doing things for themselves. And they'll whine a lot. And they'll ask you for everything under the sun. And they'll claim that it was through your intervention that they got their spiffy new pickup truck. And before long they'll pervert everything you said and start killing people and saying it's your will. I mean, you can claim that you represent peace and love and endless forgiveness and they will _still_ do it. If your thing is to represent yourself as a god of caprice and trickery and merriment, oh, you're screwed, buddy. You can't even begin to imagine the horrible things mortals will come up with to do and claim you told them to.

So, in order to make sure they don't worship you, they don't ask you for stupid stuff, they don't blame you for bringing the drought their own stupid policies of over-farming brought on and they don't end up torturing people and saying you said to, you have to make sure that mortals DON'T TRUST YOU. And if they don't trust you, then you can't betray them. I'm pretty sure that if I pulled the deepest, darkest, most embarrassing secret out of the head of any mortal who's encountered me and wrote it in letters of fire across the sky while they were in the middle of negotiating with Klingons, or at a dinner party with their mom and the Queen, or being inaugurated as President... none of them would be surprised. Upset, sure, shocked, definitely, mad at me, you betcha. But betrayed? No. None of them trust me _not_ to do something like that, so I can't betray them by doing it.

I make sure to maintain low expectations. Then it's not hard to live up to them.

As for other people betraying me... I'm used to it.


	36. mistakes were made

I'm going to go for a theme here.

It's been a while. I'm tired of dancing with myself. The entire reason I answer these things is because I have explored the entire universe, and I know everything, except the things about myself I've refused to know. The only thing I have left to explore is my own mind. ...And heart, I guess. Although I don't really have a heart. Except when I'm in a humanoid form. But you know what I mean.

_Heart's Desire: Think about something you once wanted so badly but never acquired. Write about how you think your life wouldve been different if you had received what your heart desired.  
- What do you look for in a romantic partner?- The first time I saw...  
- Talk about something you did that made you feel ashamed of yourself afterwards.  
- Write about losing control. _

There is a point to grouping these questions together.

What do I look for in a romantic partner? Boredom is my most ancient and dire enemy. If I am to have an interest in a person, whether it be a fellow Q or a mortal, they cannot bore me. They have to be unpredictable. They have to occasionally seriously piss me off. They have to be like me, or they have to be my opposite. Even my opposites, though, have to have something in their character that reminds me of myself, perhaps myself as I used to be when the universe was young and I still had a purpose in life, perhaps themselves when they were young and less weighted down by whatever boxes of tradition they've let their culture put them in over time. They have to be well-spoken and (for their species) intelligent. Practically intelligent, not just egghead intelligence -- they have to be able to come up with clever plans and outwit their enemies, because I am Trickster and I never get enough of that kind of thing. Aesthetically pleasing by the standards of their species is a plus. And they can't be hypocrites. Whatever they believe, whatever is their guiding star, their *raison d'etre*, they must live it to the fullest, even if it might destroy them. They have to be who they are. They have to like who they are. They can't break when I lean on them, they can't worship me or literally consider me a demon (a serious annoyance is ok), they can't beg for my mercy or my intervention (unless I force the issue. See below). They need to see the universe with eyes of wonder, because I can't anymore, and it was what I was born to do, and I need it, if only vicariously.

They don't have to love me. And, in fact, none of them ever have. And of course I would never have admitted to loving any of them. Admitting to love is terribly gauche in the Continuum. I do like it if they want me, and most especially if they are willing to act on that desire :-), but I don't need to participate in mortal sexual rituals to enjoy myself with the objects of my interest. I only feel such physical desires if I want to feel them, and if I don't think I'm going to get lucky, I don't let myself want it.

The first time I saw Jean-Luc Picard I had no idea. I saw a boring, stuffy, hidebound creature who wouldn't willingly take chances. I picked him for entirely stupid reasons that I've explained before, so I'm not going to do it again. My goal was to see if humanity lived up to its own hype, and since it went around declaring how peace-loving and advanced and ethical it was, I was going to see if I could shake up some human who really believed in the hype and make them fail to follow those principles. So I picked this pompous starship captain.

In our first encounter, he defied a direct order from me, after I'd proven that I had the power to destroy him any time I wanted to. Then he surrendered, but even after that, he kept trying to argue his case, convince me, and catch me in some sort of logical trap. He was actually the one to suggest that I test him -- oh, I'd planned to do it anyway, but the fact that he said it before I did was impressive. And then he refused to be rattled by my presence or to do anything he wasn't planning on doing anyway. It takes some nerve to do that around an omnipotent being who's watching you -- and I reminded him every so often that I was watching him -- and he still pulled it off.

His first officer seemed more of an explorer, more of a rule-breaker, and at the time he seemed like he might be more interesting. He wasn't all talk like his captain. I soon found out that he couldn't walk the walk, though. _He_ could be tempted into violating his ethics for expedience. I offered him the powers of the Q (it was, I admit, an unparalleledly stupid move on my part -- I was so focused on scoring points against humanity, I somehow failed to remember that if I _won_ I was going to have to live with this twit FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY), and he came _soo_ close to accepting, despite the human belief that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And Picard tempted him back. From the brink of absolute power. Picard and his ethics could exert more control over a human soul than I could with the lure of immortality and omnipotence. Words cannot describe how much this event PISSED ME OFF.

That... is when I fell in love with Jean-Luc Picard.

You have to understand this. I was enraged. I, an almighty Q, had been beaten by a mere human at a test I _cared_ about winning... and totally humiliated in front of my own people, who gave me a royal chewing out for trying to create a new Q without their permission and then told me to take a hike... and tricked. Because these humans, they were fascinating, but Picard had tricked me into agreeing that if I lost, I would leave humanity alone forever. And I can't _stand_ staying away from something that interests me. There's so little that does.

He beat me. At my own game. In the immortal words of some 21st century human teenager, "God, that's hot." I mean, I was furious, and I loved it. Because I _could lose._ Because the deck wasn't stacked anymore, the universe wasn't predictable, something could happen that I totally did not expect and he had _made_ it happen. A lowly mortal. No one, _no one_, had ever surprised me and thrown me that far off balance unless they were actively trying to kill or destroy me, which Picard was not. My humiliation in front of the Continuum hurt, but the fact that the universe now had something in it that I didn't fully understand, something new I could explore? I was so excited I _almost_ didn't care about the Continuum telling me they didn't want me coming home. Almost.

I watched him for a while. I saw him beat down another powerful entity who wanted to experiment on his crew with nothing but the force of his words and his beliefs. And I knew that if I couldn't go home, I wanted to be there. With him. I wanted to show him the universe. I wanted him to need me. Wanting me would also have been nice, but I had to feel like I belonged to something, and the Continuum was shunning me, so I wanted to belong to him. Or him belong to me, whichever. It wasn't about sex, not like I'd have turned him down, but that wasn't what I was after. I just wanted to make a connection. I didn't need him to love me or even like me but I needed him to be _interested_ in me. To find me useful.

To need me.

So I did two awful things.

Firstly, I altered his memories. I couldn't get around a prohibition on ever interfering with humanity again with a legalistic fiction. So I made him think that the stakes of our bet were that I would not go near his ship or his crew... and then I kidnapped him via remote teleportation. The kidnapping was all fun and games, I don't regret that, but I regret tampering with his mind. That is one of the worst violations the Q can commit, at least against each other, and for me to do that to a mere mortal might have been forgiveable except that he was a mere mortal I wanted desperately to connect with, on his own level, and therefore what I did was a crime. On the other hand, he still doesn't know I did it, and I probably will never tell him, so... no harm, no foul. It wasn't a _serious_ tampering.

The second thing happened when I lost control.

You want to know what happened? I went to him and offered my services. I told him I wanted to join his crew. That I'd even be willing to make the supreme sacrifice of putting my powers aside, all so I could be with him, so I could _help_ him, and guide him. I, a god, lowered myself to offering friendship and _service_ to a mere mortal. I basically offered to be his pet djinn, a spirit of chaos tamed at his side to do his bidding. I was so alone without the Continuum, and so desperately fascinated with him, I'd have done anything for him. Anything.

And he turned me down.

So I threw him and his crew to the Borg.

The Borg are a ruthless, nasty cyborg race that consume and destroy everyone unfortunate enough to cross their path. They are kind of like a natural disaster, or maybe lions. You can't negotiate with them, you can't generally outfight them, you can't usually outrun them, and for most mortals, if you meet them, you're screwed. They destroy the individuality, the selfhood, of the people they run into, and they absorb the technology. I hate them, actually, but there are other Q who like them, so doing anything about them wasn't really an option. But they were on the slow boat to Earth, and I knew Picard and his Federation would confront the Borg eventually, and be totally unprepared, and try to negotiate, and be swallowed whole. And when Picard accepted my offer, the first thing I was going to do was tell him all about the Borg and offer to show him what they had done to other worlds. Safely.

But he turned me down. So I decided to let him learn about the Borg the hard way.

I would have killed him, you know. The same short-sightedness that led me to try to make a Q in order to score points on Picard would have had me kill the only being that interested me, because his rejection _hurt._ A lot. I'm used to rejection. In fact many of my games are played for amusing rejections. I don't set out to be liked, so I don't usually care if I'm not. But this wasn't a game. I wanted him to accept me, at least, if he wouldn't like me, and he didn't do either. And he told me his lowly species, who I _knew_ were going to get their asses handed to them by the Borg if I didn't do anything, could handle any problem the universe threw at them, all by themselves. So I was going to let him prove it.

The Borg killed 18 members of his crew. That still hurts him. I didn't realize how much it would hurt him -- I thought of them as mere collateral damage, and anyway, if he wouldn't admit to me that he needed my help I was going to let the Borg kill them _all._ And they learned -- they learned about his ship, his crew. About him. They downloaded his ship's data banks. And they're not stupid. They could detect my presence, they realized that I had an interest in him. It made humanity more interesting to them, more vital to assimilate. It made them interested in _him._

He did admit it. He surrendered. He told me he needed me. His pride, that overwhelming pride that almost matched my own... he bent it, he pushed it aside to beg for my help. Even though he believed that asking for the help of an omnipotent being was unethical, he did it because he realized it was the only way he was going to live. And I made him do that. In a tiny way, I broke him. At the time the admission thrilled me, and I saved him and let him go, and went back to quietly observing him and his ship, but now my behavior really rather disgusts me.

And then.

And then the Borg came, and they took him, and made him one of them. Because of what I'd done.

In the interim, I'd been stripped of my powers, and Picard and his crew had taken me in until the Continuum had relented. The Continuum put me on probation, though. No more interfering in major ways with mortals, unless authorized by them. They hadn't liked my little stunt with the Borg. So when the Borg came back, and they knew about Picard because _I'd_ shown them, and they found him interesting because _I_ found him interesting and they think the Q are perfect and they want to be perfect so they'll run around grabbing anything we like too much and studying it if we let them. So they assimilated him, and they made him their spokesbeing to humanity, a new trick on their part, and they used his knowledge -- and his face, and his voice -- to destroy about an umpteen zillion members of his precious Starfleet. And I couldn't do _anything._ Because if I did anything, the Continuum would throw me out again, and I was a coward.

The creatures I most despise in all the universe violated the person I most cared about in the most horrific way _I_ can imagine -- the destruction of the self is what the Q fear most of all -- and it was my fault. And yet I stood by and did nothing, because I was too scared.

I don't usually believe in guilt. You did what you did, okay, move on. No point in regrets. But because of what I did, Picard will _never_ trust me, will _never_ like me, will _never_ come to join me. Will never take favors from me, no matter how heartfelt, unless I basically force them on him. And I can't say I don't deserve that. He lived, he got over it, it all worked out in the end. But he still has nightmares about it. It broke him, and he healed but the break scarred over and will never be as strong as it once was. He will never be as whole as he once was. And that's my fault. Because I lost control, because I got angry, and then because I was too scared to intervene to stop what I'd set in motion.

It's not enough for me to simply amuse myself at his expense and move on. I love to watch him, but if I'm with him, he doesn't trust me and he doesn't like me and I can't seem to get past that with him. So I don't manifest myself to him, most of the time. He doesn't know I'm watching him. Certainly he doesn't know that I've finally admitted to myself what I should have admitted all along, that it's not just an interest, an amusement. I love him. It hurts me when I see him suffer. I've never felt that for anyone, _anyone_, before him. Watching my previous objects of interest suffer was merely amusing because then I could watch the clever way they'd get out of it. I never felt... sympathy... before. But he won't take anything from me overtly, and I don't trust myself to be subtle around him, so I'll save his life without him knowing it but everything else that happens to him, happens, and I don't interfere because he wouldn't want me to. Even if he would, in the moment that it is happening, want me to, the way I made him want me to by breaking him down with the Borg. He thinks it's unethical to take favors from me, and I _hate_ that, but I'm going to respect it because... because I care. Because even if he'll never like me, let alone love me, even if he'll never accept me, I _can't_ do to him what I did in the past, not now that I know what the consequences are.

What is my heart's desire? At this point it should be obvious. There's only one thing in my existence I have ever desperately wanted and not been able to get, eventually. I want Jean-Luc to accept me, to need me, to take favors from me. I want him to join me, to become a Q and never die. But he doesn't trust me. Because after what I've done how could he? And I'm never going to get past that with him, I think.

If he would have -- if he would have agreed to join me, or even if he'd agreed to treat me as a friend -- I think things might be very different. I might have been willing to turn to him, when the war broke out, instead of going to Janeway. I thought Janeway would help me because it was her fault in the first place, and I didn't want to lose face in front of Picard, but if he'd ever given me an opening I could have pushed aside _my_ pride. If I wasn't sure he'd reject me out of hand and refuse to even pay attention and worse yet, give me a _lecture_, I could have gone to him for help. And, well, let's just say I'm not married to the concept of keeping this particular physical body. If it would have helped, I could have taken female form. He might have done for me what Janeway wouldn't, because he would have been ethical enough to sacrifice to stop a war his people triggered by their interference. And I don't know how that would have changed things, but it would have. I'm sure of it.

But nothing like that is ever going to happen. Because I ruined it.


	37. Drowning In Sap

I'm not usually the kind of person to wax eloquent on the values of forgiveness and kindness. Mark your calendars, this may be a red-letter day.

**Forgiveness and kindness? If there was any more sap in this I could make maple syrup and pour it on my pancakes.**

_Who do you need to forgive?_

Who do I _need_ to forgive? That's easy enough. In fact I've talked about this once already. It's incredibly poisonous and damaging to the psyche, not to mention just plain annoying, to have to share eternity with people you hate. So I _need_ to forgive the various people on the other side of the civil war, those who were so dedicated to the proposition that nothing in the Continuum should ever change that they were willing to murder my friends to achieve it. And I _need_ to forgive my ex for walking out on me and my son (not so much the walking out part as the vicious things she said about the boy at the time.)

Of course, _can_ I forgive these things? Maybe in another few million years.

I have, however, managed to forgive a former close friend, the guy who got me thrown out of the Continuum. Mostly.

_Talk about a moving act of kindness you experienced or witnessed._

Although I have seen many, many beings commit acts of kindness throughout my existence, I am generally unmoved by them. Usually acts of kindness are a good way to advertise that you are a doormat, and I have no respect for doormats. Or they're performed with some ulterior motive in mind. Or, they involve concepts like forgiving your enemies when you are _not_ omnipotent and immortal and therefore said enemies can still kill you if you aren't paying attention. I don't respect stupidity, either.

The first act of kindness that actually moved me, and the one that still impresses me most, happened during the aforementioned time period of being thrown out of the Continuum, when I was mortal and helpless. Entities called the Calamarain were trying to kill me, the people I'd taken sanctuary with hated me (not quite enough to throw me out the airlock and let the Calamarain kill me, but they made sure I knew they were contemplating it), my greatest mortal nemesis stabbed me with a fork and then gloated over me after the first time the Calamarain almost killed me, and I was feeling incredibly isolated and miserable. I had dug in my heels with a me-against-the-universe attitude, mustering up all kinds of anger and bad feelings about pretty much everyone so I wouldn't have to face how lonely I was. I mean, when everyone in the universe _is_ out to get you, or at least standing against you, rage and paranoia and a profound dislike for everyone in the universe is a fairly normal reaction. At least I think so.

Then the Calamarain tried to kill me again, and an android named Data, who had been my sole guide and source of assistance in surviving my awful new life, came to my rescue, and held onto me (despite being electrocuted) in order to save my life.

Ironically, Data's act in saving me at risk to his own life led me to decide to kill myself. As long as I was full of so much anger at everyone, I couldn't see outside my own head at all, I couldn't bring myself to face the truth -- which was that it was pretty obvious these people couldn't protect me and still save themselves and several million random mortals on a planet whose moon was crashing out of orbit -- and I couldn't accept how much I needed not to be alone. Data's sacrifice in saving my life broke me out of my self-absorption. The fact that someone else would, and did, risk their lives to save me broke down my defenses, and I realized that it was completely unfair for someone who wasn't as miserable as I was to die for me, that I didn't want to live if I couldn't belong anywhere, that the fact that everyone else hated me actually _hurt_ (yes, that seems like it should be obvious, but I was used to being hated by mortals. It was kind of par for the course for me, actually. I wasn't used to being emotionally vulnerable to it.) And that these people who really couldn't stand me were actually making a sacrifice themselves, on the basis of their principles, to keep me alive, and it was going to get them all destroyed. Sooner or later the Calamarain would destroy them to get to me, and then millions of innocent people would be killed. Or, they'd have to betray their principles and toss me to the Calamarain, and it would cause a whole lot less suffering all around if I just took the decision out of their hands and handed myself over.

My people decided that getting my head out of my own ass and thinking about other people for once qualified as enough of a change in my usual behavior that they could take me back. So, indirectly, Data's act of kindness in saving my life enabled me to be reinstated to the Continuum. Nothing else I've seen (as far as acts of kindness, anyway) has made quite as much of an impression on me since.


	38. Heavy Is The Burden of Being Me

The advantage to only getting around to these when the mood strikes me is that then I can go all thematic. Certainly, given the repetition of questions about trust, betrayal, and so on, sometimes one _needs_ to go for a theme or else risk having to repeat oneself, and I do so hate to repeat myself.

_When in your life did you know you were not alone?_

At the moment of my creation.

The Q are _never_ alone. We can't be, we're part of an overmind. Our selves, everything that we are, are inextricably linked to one another... whether we like it or not. Frequently, I come down on the side of "like it not", but then, I didn't have much fun either of the two times I have been separated from the Continuum.

_What is your greatest strength? _

I exist within an overmind. I am, like all of my people, dependent on the existence of the rest of the Q the way you mortals depend on air to breathe. But, while all of us struggle to maintain a certain degree of independence from the other Q, I've made an art form of it. When entropy takes us, we don't die... we conform. We lose our selves, our independence, our "me-ness" in the ocean of "we" we swim in. And we are five billion years old (give or take; some are a bit older than that.) There's been a lot of time for entropy to work on us. Very few of the Q have nearly so strong an identity as they had when we were born.

I, however, am still considered one of the most independent Q in the Continuum. I have always fought entropy by standing for change. Maybe change for change's sake, maybe change because it's just boring not to change, maybe my reasons weren't always entirely stellar, but when we change, when we grow (or shrink for that matter), we fight entropy's hold on us. We fight the conformity that has slowly been consuming us. I've done some genuinely stupid things in my time, and some things that had no good reason, and maybe even a few things one could call downright evil, and I can't say my motives were always pure. But I have always (almost always) been willing to stand up to the Continuum. I've always been willing to say that not only does the Emperor have no clothes, but the rest of us are butt naked, too. I've always been willing to demand that we break from tradition, that we do things that are different just because they're different, that we take risks and occasionally _do_ things that are stupid because it's better to be stupid than dead, and utter conformity is our version of death.

There have been enormous forces arrayed against me, in my lifetime. People who are being sucked down the black hole of conformity and sameness don't like to hear a message of change, advocacy of difference. Also, they think they know what's right and appropriate, which makes my behavior terribly gauche, don'cha know. They've always pressured me to be a good little Q, but I'm stubborn enough that it almost never worked. And that is my strength (and, to be fair, probably one of my larger weaknesses as well); I don't play well with others, I don't listen, I don't do what other people tell me to do. I oppose authority because it's there. And that has enabled me to remain a maverick for five billion years, and hopefully for many aeons more.

_Talk about a time you overcame serious self-doubt. _

As one might imagine, a society that has come to be consumed by stultifying sameness and the tyranny of the status quo would rather not hear from a rebel very often. Many times, the Continuum tried to contain me, but they tried the tactics that worked on everyone else -- shame, humiliation, chastisement. These don't work on me so well. Oh, I'm as vulnerable as any other Q to mockery, but I'm also better at it than most of them, so few of them want to go mano a mano against me. And chastisement only works if you actually feel guilt, which I don't, usually.

And then I went too far, and they finally had an excuse. They threw me out of the Continuum and took away my powers. At that they were going easy on me; an old friend of mine sold me out, advocating the removal of my powers, because he was trying to prevent the rest of them from deciding to outright kill me. They only had to exile me for a single day; the combined stresses of loneliness, being hated by everyone around me, feeling crippled and helpless, and then the fact that there were entities trying to kill me, left me terrified. When they took me back, I was overjoyed and relieved, but I never stopped being afraid that they might do it again. So for a while -- six years, which should be nothing to the existence of an immortal, but it seemed longer than some millennia I've lived through -- they had me broken. I conformed, I was a good little Q, I did everything they told me to, including things I personally found morally reprehensible.

And it wasn't all fear. A lot of it was self-doubt. You simply can't be part of an overmind without absorbing _some_ of their opinions; I couldn't fully bring myself to believe that I was right and every other omniscient, omnipotent immortal with access to the same knowledge I had was wrong. It was just easier to take the blame. To believe that I'd lost my powers because I was a bad Q, and thus my judgement and my moral sense were suspect, and I should defer to the will and the judgement of the others. Frankly, it was too painful to admit to myself how much of a coward I was being; it was easier to believe that I was just wrong, that I was slavishly obeying them because I'd had my eyes opened and I realized they were right, than to recognize that I was doing things I considered morally wrong because I was just plain scared.

Then the Continuum sent me to enforce the sentence of a dissident philosopher who we'd stuck in an incredibly, soul-destroyingly boring prison because he was trying to kill himself. And honestly? No, I didn't think he should kill himself. I didn't agree with his ideological reasons for trying to do it, and in a lot of ways I thought he was doing harm to the cause he and I shared, the belief that the Continuum was stagnating and it should change. So it wasn't hard to convince myself I was doing the right thing. But I wasn't. I was betraying my ideals, and he knew it, and he pointed it out to me. When the ruling went against the Continuum, I let it stand, even though it was just a mortal making the judgement and I could very easily have pulled in the rest of the Continuum on the grounds that a mortal wasn't a particularly worthy judge and we should just overrule her. Because he stood up for his beliefs. He had endured three hundred years of boredom and loneliness -- I was nearly insane after only 40 -- and he stood up to the Continuum despite it, whereas I caved after less than a day of losing my powers. I was ashamed of how weak I'd been, of how I'd let the Continuum push me around, and how I'd let my own fear take over my judgement. I let the ruling that he had the right to die stand, I made him mortal, and when he decided to try to kill himself with a steak knife, I stepped in and gave him a poison to take so he could die with dignity.

The rest of the Continuum was not happy. But I did the right thing. I followed _my_ moral beliefs, not the ones they were trying to impose on me. And I have vowed that I will never again let fear and self-doubt control what I do, or make me conform blindly to what they want me to be.


	39. Question Bucket Strikes Back

Ah, I've been entirely too deep and thematic lately. Time to answer a handful of completely pointless questions that have nothing to do with each other!

_What is the best present you have ever given someone else? _

Hard to say. I have been known to give out some seriously nice presents, if I do say so myself. Usually no one's grateful, so I suppose the best presents would have to be the ones that I actually got a little gratitude for. Among the better ones were the time I gave Data the experience of laughter, as a reward for saving my life, and the time I gave Tanith Estar her freedom, the freedom of all the other enslaved female dissidents on her homeworld, and a whole planet to play with. What can I say? She was impressive. Slaves with grandiose plans for changing the world demonstrate such a delightful arrogance, I had to let her see if she could create the female utopia she thought she could. Turns out, of course, she couldn't, but at least her planet runs better than the one I took her from.

_What is your favorite thing to do to relax? _

Wander around the universe looking for something novel enough to entertain me.

_What do you think when you look in the mirror? _

I don't, much. There are no mirrors in the Continuum -- we don't use visual light to see by, and we really don't have any reliable way to see ourselves. And if I want to look at a mortal body I've taken the form of, I can just do it, I don't need a mirror.

But oh, I'm sure the question is trying to be metaphorical. What do I see when I visualize myself? Once upon a time -- a very, very long time ago -- I used to see an intrepid explorer. And then a carefree, witty fellow who was just out to have fun. And then an outcast, a misfit, a much-put-upon whipping boy for the entire Continuum. Now... I have no idea. I'm a rebel who's been co-opted by the establishment in the process of creating his utopia, a father in a society that's never had individualized parents, and somewhere inside deep down there's still all the other selves, the explorer, the fun-loving guy, the outcast. I think I get _less_ certain of my identity as the centuries wear on... which is probably bad. Loss of identity is the Q equivalent of death. Maybe I'm going senile. Or maybe my passion for change and the new means I'll never be the same person over any extended period of time. I suspect I like it better that way, actually. Who wants to be predictable?

_What is the greatest sacrifice you've made for love?_

If you're talking about romantic love, I can say pretty definitely that I have never sacrificed anything at all for love, and probably never will.

I do love my son, though, and I've made a lot of sacrifices for him -- okay, baby Q don't have diapers to change, but they do run around the universe causing incredible chaos and disruption and need to be constantly watched over. I've lost a lot of time I could have spent having fun, a lot of time I could have spent trying to reshape my culture, and, frankly, I've frequently been bored out of my mind.

_If you could take back one thing you said in anger, what would it be and why? _

I can't be bothered taking back anything I said. The things I _did_ in anger, now, that's a different story. But anyone who knows me has to know that my relationship with mortal language and communication is, shall we say, not exactly the dedicated, monogamously honest marriage most people think their relationship with their own words should be. In other words, I should hope that no one who knows me well enough that I care about their opinion actually takes anything I say very seriously.

_Write about your father._

I don't have a father. I have an entire Continuum. This has made it very, very difficult to manage the task of being a father myself. I was created as an adolescent; how does one teach a child? Discipline him? Strike a balance between helping him and letting him find his own way? All I know is what the Continuum did to me when they wanted to shape my behavior, and I know that firstly it didn't usually work, and secondly, I wasn't a child at the time (and thirdly, I'm not sure I can bring myself to be quite that cruel to him.)


	40. April Fool's Day 2

I may have mentioned before that April Fools' Day is one of my favorite holidays. Humans are normally such a stuffy, serious race, attaching such tremendous weight and import to their silly little lives and customs. The fact that they have a holiday to celebrate trickery and misrule is simply delightful. So yesterday I took my son to the Renaissance (no, not the Renaissance Fair -- traveling in time to a holiday in a different year when it's _not_ that day today is cheating, but traveling to a holiday in a different year when it's that holiday today is just good clean fun), where he actually managed to _not_ get himself accused of witchcraft this time (to be fair, the people of the Renaissance weren't entirely sure they were unsophisticated enough to believe in witchcraft.) He played the role of a traveling magician and did a few very impressive tricks (well, impressive to mortals; to the Q they were about as remarkable as driving your car to the grocery store to get milk, but then again, in the Renaissance that _would_ have been pretty impressive.)

After that, we dropped in on a former playmate of my son's -- admittedly, a not entirely willing former playmate. (When my son was a tad younger than he is now, he picked up on my fascination with humans, and particularly with a specific human starship captain, and snagged a human starship captain of his own to play with. Unfortunately, being a child, he wasn't exactly all that nice to his toys, so my not-yet-ex-then and I had to step in and take him back to the Continuum or he'd have killed the poor guy.) We turned their ship computer sentient and had it fall in love with the captain, infested their engine room with pink and chartreuse tribbles, and made the Vulcan science officer speak in iambic pentameter for the rest of the day. Good times, good times. The really funny part was when the starship captain figured out it was my son behind the whole thing, and gave him a stern talking-to, which included the line "Do your parents know where you are?" My son attempted to explain that I had actually _brought_ him on this trip, but since I positively refused to manifest when he asked me to, it was a rather amusingly embarrassing situation for him. No, I'm not above playing practical jokes on my own kid, either.

_What are you happy about right now?_

That is. It's not often I get to have much fun lately -- the kid takes up _so_ much of my time -- but he's finally old enough now that I can enjoy a little father-son bonding with him, take him out for excursions and the like. And as much fun as it is to play tricks on people, it turns out it's even _more_ fun to have someone young and impressionable to share your amusement with. Teaching my son what constitutes a really funny joke is even more pleasurable than playing the joke out itself. It's also still quite a lot of fun to torment human starship captains, and I can't do that with my usual starship captains any more since I've actually developed some empathy for them (oh, the horror). I can't play tricks on Kathy or Jean-Luc without feeling bad about it. Jim Kirk, however, really deserves a few more jokes played at his expense.

So let's talk about fun and mockery.

**How fart jokes brought down an emperor, and other stories**

_Write about a time you mocked somebody._

_A_ time? My entire _life_ is about mocking people. But okay. Here's a good story.

The Emperor of the Filo Empire, on the planet Cherassa, about five hundred years ago, was considered so holy and godlike by his people that they were not actually allowed to look at his face. He could only go out in public with an elaborate mask on, and he spent a lot of time sitting behind screens or being covered up by giant fans held by blind naked slaves or things like that. He also wore tall gilded platform shoes because his feet were never supposed to touch the ground, was wrapped entirely in robes so no part of his skin was ever visible, et cetera, ad nauseam.

Now, at least some of the Emperors had the good sense to think all this protocol was stupid and privately rebelled against it or at least complained to their wives. But Emperor Zavoriat did not. _He_ thought he really was all that and a chocolate biscuit. Despite the fact that he _had_ to have been aware that he required food and sleep like any mortal, and had to take baths, and got mild illnesses, he actually believed his own hype about being a god in mortal form.

So I turned up in the guise of an old man, got into the palace as a supposed supplicant, bypassed the bureaucrats by turning invisible, and just kind of wandered in to the audience room. I said something like, "O great Emperor, you are the hand of God here in the mortal world, but is it not true that you yourself are a mortal man, and pass water and wind like any other?"

He didn't take that so well. He tried to have his guards drag me off and beat me, presumably to death, for insolence. I let them smack me around a little and pull me as far as the door to the chamber. Then I turned around, looked over at the masked emperor, and said "You _are_ a mortal man, and the gods do not favor those who claim their status wrongly. They will punish you for your arrogance, O emperor."

Then I vanished.

Then I had a soundtrack of really loud farting noises accompany the emperor every time he walked anywhere. Step, fart. Pass by in a litter, fart. Sit on his dais, fart. He had all kinds of magicians come in and try to take the curse off, but since none of them really did have any supernatural powers and I really did, obviously this did not work. When he tried to have one magician executed for being unable to help him, I turned the executioner's sword to rubber, and it kept bouncing off the guy's neck. Then I jumped up on the execution stage, in the guise of the old man, and yelled, "It is the mercy of the gods! All praise the gods' mercy for sparing this man!" The emperor pretty much had to let the magician go at that point, and then he couldn't really justify executing any of the others. I also turned up in the emperor's bedroom a few times to suggest that maybe he might want to drop the "I am a god" act and perhaps _that_ would convince the actual gods to rescind his punishment. He didn't. He made farting noises everywhere he went for another year or two. I added smell, and then I added clouds of harmless green and yellow gas, and then I started giving him terrible stomach cramps every time he said something really pompous.

Finally his son deposed him on the grounds that he had obviously earned the displeasure of the gods, and publicly admitted that yes, the emperor and his line _were_ mortal men and should not claim to be gods. A wise choice on the young man's part, if you ask me. Cherassa's a constitutional monarchy or something like that now. Haven't been back in a while.

_Did you ever intentionally make a complete fool out of yourself while fully realizing what you were doing? _

Sure. I play the fool when it serves my purpose. You can't be all "I am omnipotent, fear me!" all the time, and in fact, I don't like doing it _most_ of the time. My little boxing match with Benjamin Sisko didn't exactly earn me any fear and awe creds, but on the other hand, I actually got him to punch me out, which I never managed to provoke even _Worf_ into doing. Now that? Was funny.

I also have to admit I probably clowned around just a bit too much when I was trying to get Kathy (that's Captain Kathryn Janeway to you) to have my baby. I'd _heard_ human women like a guy with a sense of humor, and I certainly didn't want to scare her, and, you know, I've been told that when I'm actually trying I do come across as quite mad, bad and dangerous to know, so I was trying to put her at ease. Tone down the bad boy aspects a bit. Her ex was a kind of dull boy-next-door type (okay, a smart guy and all, for a human, but hardly a firework show) and the guy she was dancing around with a "will-we-or-won't-we" thing was a wooden Indian -- and I mean that literally. (Well, the literal part is the Indian part. The wooden part merely refers to his brain.) She didn't seem like the kind of woman who went for the bad boys. So I made a complete idiot of myself so she wouldn't be intimidated. I put flowers in her room, I fixed up her bed, I (temporarily) put on a tattoo to mock Chakotay's, I claimed my biological clock was ticking... Unfortunately, it didn't work -- she wasn't intimidated, but she also didn't think I was attractive. (I must, here, interject a graphic shudder at the tastes of a woman who could possibly prefer Commander Chuckles the Wilderness Man to _moi._) Later on she nearly had a fling with an enemy fascist who liked to send telepaths to concentration camps, so obviously I _should_ have gone for the bad boy thing, but who knew?


	41. Perception

_Perception: Generally speaking, how do you think others perceive you? _

Ahem.

(taps a microphone that has suddenly materialized out of nowhere) Is this thing on? Okay? Good.

(backup singers materialize out of nowhere, as the music begins)

**With apologies to Denis Leary...**

(sings, in what is a surprisingly bad singing voice considering that this is an omnipotent being)

My species is super-evolved  
With omnipotent powers  
All the universe's knowledge  
Has become ours  
We test mortals, and study, and question  
And sometimes we guide  
We help others to rise  
Toward the state we abide... in...

But sometimes that's just not enough  
To keep a being like me interested  
(Backup singers: No way, no how, uh-uh)  
I gotta go out and have fun  
At someone else's expense  
(Backup singers: Oh yeah, yeah yeah)

I teleport captains to faraway places  
While hapless first officers make monkey-like faces  
I'm an asshole  
(Backup singers: He's an asshole)  
What an asshole  
Galaxy's biggest asshole

I make nasty comments  
About other species  
Making mortals wish  
They could rip me to pieces

I show up at random  
In ship captains' beds  
I make fun of Ferengi  
and of Klingon foreheads

I'm an asshole  
(Backup singers: He's an asshole)  
What an asshole  
Galaxy's biggest asshole

Maybe I shouldn't be singing this song  
Ranting and raving and carrying on  
Maybe they're right when they say that I'm wrong...

Naah!

I'm an asshole  
(Backup singers: He's an asshole)  
What an asshole  
Galaxy's biggest asshole...

* * *

_Author's Note: Based on "The Asshole Song" by Denis Leary. And the actor who plays Q, John de Lancie, really __can't_ sing.


	42. Motherhood is Highly Overrated

_Write about mother (your own or someone else's)._

I only know two mothers from my own species, since we've only ever had two children.

Hmm, perhaps I should clarify. The Q don't have gender. I suppose it makes just as much sense for me to call myself a mother as to call my ex one. However... I don't feel like it. As long as I'm talking to an audience of mostly humans, I prefer to hang onto the human form I chose, which happens to be male. Also, a mother who was abandoned by a father is such a stereotype, and I prefer to be more unpredictable than that. Besides, I am a totally irresponsible and hedonistic entity who managed to stick by his kid anyway, and I want credit for it, dammit. "Mothers" are supposed to be all self-sacrificing and whatnot, whereas fathers are perfectly free to admit that sometimes they hate the little shit and wish they never had him, without it being held against them as long as they _do_ the right thing.

What species invented this self-sacrificial stereotype for mothers, anyway, and why do they play into it?

Anyway, mothers. There have been two Q mothers. First, Q and Q decided they were going to hang out with humans. This was before I got interested in humans, so frankly I thought they were nuts. They took human form, they went to Earth, they invented identities for themselves... and then Q got herself knocked up. At the time I thought the sensible thing to do would have been to not create herself a body so accurately as that it was _capable_ of human reproduction, let alone actually go through with a pregnancy. I mean, she got fat. She had to use her powers to keep her human body from pissing its pants. Her human form turned all ugly and puffy. And when I showed up to mock her about it, she and Q (who had, sensibly, taken the male form, and was thus avoiding all the unpleasantness), rhapsodized to me about the miracle of life and their fascination with their project, the idea of creating a Q child incarnate in a mortal body.

See, the main reason we don't reproduce, aside from being immortal and therefore not needing to, is that until me and my ex figured out how to do it, infant Q could not survive the Continuum, but no Q can survive without the Continuum. The chaotic energies of our realm require a near-adult mind to channel and focus them; a Q without an unshakeable sense of self will be absorbed into our overmind, and a Q without precise control over its powers will theoretically burn to nothingness under the onslaught of chaotic energy the first time they try to draw power from the Continuum. At least, for billions of years that was the theory. Q and Q believed they could solve the problem by creating their child anchored within a mortal body, so that until that mortal brain developed enough that it could bridge the connection to the Continuum and start sending and receiving to the overmind, the child would simply be mortal. Well, better than most mortals, and perhaps harder to kill, but essentially not really a Q until the connection to the Continuum kicked in. Some of us thought the research was interesting, perhaps worthy - I personally had no interest in offspring at the time, but what the hell, I'm always up for finding out something new - but that the way they were going about it was stupid. They had cut themselves off from us, mostly, for the sake of protecting this child... and because they were having fun slumming it and playing human. And you're not _allowed_ to do that. Living with mortals as if you were mortal yourself is all right if you don't use your powers, but it's hardly fair if you do, and it's kind of pathetic. (Yes, given that I tried to do the same thing years later, I suppose this is hypocritical of me, but then, in retrospect _I_ was being kind of pathetic when I tried it.)

Overall, though, the Continuum disapproved. We had already made mortals into Q, we didn't see the need to make more. Having a new Q start out as an infant was somewhat interesting, but given that she wouldn't truly be Q until she was an adolescent, and every other Q in the Continuum (except for the very oldest, the pioneers who created us) started out as, effectively, an adolescent, what was the point? Also, they were very plainly rejecting the rest of us and declaring that this small, pathetic species was more interesting than their companions of five billion years. (Truth hurts.) So we told them they would have to do without their powers, or they would have to come home.

Q was unwilling to abandon her baby. Her boyfriend thought of it more as an interesting experiment; he had some willingness to hand the child over to human surrogates and see how things would turn out. But _she_ was all "mothers don't abandon their children!", which just goes to show, she's never seen a kangaroo throw her joey to a predator so she can run away faster. Her obsession with raising her own child, protecting and caring for the mindless little thing, blinded her to the political danger she and her lover were in. Several of us tried to talk them out of it, but he was besotted with love for her and she was besotted with the kid, so they wouldn't come home. And they wouldn't stop using their powers. I can't blame them for that - after the one day I spent without powers, I wouldn't ever agree to refrain from using them - but the Continuum did. Orders were orders, and they had disobeyed.

They lived in Kansas, on Earth. The Q who actually carried out the execution had something of a sick sense of humor - they cut the two off from the Continuum and then had a tornado touch down on top of their house and destroy it. We let the kid live, I tested her and brought her into the Continuum when she finally reached age, and as it turns out it was one of the best things I ever did because if it hadn't been for her, me and all my political allies would have died in the first skirmish of the war. But that's beside the point.

So the first Q mother was loving and self-sacrificial, stupidly so. The second Q mother was just a bitch. My ex didn't have to endure any of that disgusting pregnancy stuff - she and I created our baby within the Continuum, nice and clean, and took on the role of shielding him and filtering the raw energies around him so that he could, in fact, live within the Continuum, though when he was younger we still took him out as frequently as we could for his own safety and to give ourselves a break.

I have known her my entire life. We'd been lovers and best friends about half my life, off and on. I had no idea how much, deep down, she really despised me until she started seeing me in our son and decided that I had "ruined" him, and that if she didn't run out on me I'd run out on her first. Yeah, okay, raising a kid was a lot more stressful and time-consuming than either of us expected, but _I_ stuck with it. Me, Mr. Irresponsibility, Next of Kin to Chaos. She walked. Spends most of her time out of the Continuum nowadays, too; I suppose she's just that disgusted with the both of us.

So. Mothers. We've had one idiot and one bitch. Not a great track record. Of course I can't say much for our fathers either, given that I'm one of them and the other one was as big an idiot as his girlfriend, but hey, _I_ am still alive and sticking with the job, which is more than either of the mothers can say. 


	43. Yet Another Question Bucket

**Am I supposed to take any of these seriously?**

_What are you like in the morning?_

Since I don't live in linear time and I don't sleep, the same as I am at any other time of "day", inasmuch as time of day means anything to me at all, which it doesn't.

_What does "karma" mean to you?_

A hilarious joke. The universe is spectacularly unfair. Except when it's not.

_Superstition. Are you superstitious about anything? Is someone you know superstitious?_

No. Superstition comes about when beings attempt to create patterns out of insufficient information. By definition, as a Q, I always have sufficient information, therefore I never need to develop a superstition. As for knowing superstitious people, superstitious people tend to declare me a god, or a demon, and either bores me to tears. So I *know* superstitious people, but I'm not interested in any of them.

_At times, lots of people never tell us what they are really thinking. Who is the one person that you would really like to know what they are thinking (as far as how they feel about you), and why?_

Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case sometimes is), I know everything I want to know. Therefore, if there was one person I really wanted to know what they were thinking of me, I'd already know it.

Sadly, I think I already do. I'm trying to avoid confirming my suspicions, but it's hard to shut off omniscience.

_What does your dream home look like?_

I am intelligent enough to know that the things I long for are too internally contradictory to actually exist together. I'd like to live somewhere completely different, somewhere where I can explore at leisure, where I don't already know everything there is to know, and where the people are different than the ones I've spent eternity with. Except that when I got all that it was the most miserable, terrifying day of my life and I ended up trying to kill myself. Maybe it might be possible to find a place to dwell where I'd have a happy medium between total omnipotence and boredom, and absolute powerlessness and ignorance and boredom. But I doubt it.

_What was/is your childhood ambition? _

To discover everything there is to know.

Unfortunately, I achieved it.

_Describe a chance encounter that changed your life._

I'm pretty sure I did this already.

_When I awoke the next morning... _

I repeated myself, in stating that I DON'T SLEEP.

Not voluntarily, anyway. I fell asleep once, during that horrific day while I was human, and it was awful. Never again, I tell you. 


	44. Comfort, and the Lack Thereof

_What does "comfort" mean to you?_

Not a whole lot.

The Q don't need comfort. We're immortal and omnipotent, and we were all born (or created, if you like) this way. None of us were ever children (well, with the exception of the two that were, one of whom, my son, still is). And we are tied to each other through the Continuum, the overmind that links us all, which means that we never need reassuring that we have a place to belong or that there are people who care about us. We know all that, thank you very much, now go away. Our problem isn't isolation, it's that we can never be truly alone. So we generally spend a lot of time defending ourselves against mental incursions from the others. We can't let down our defenses to our fellows, and while some of us are willing to do so with mortals, asking a mortal to comfort you is rather like expecting comfort from your goldfish. Or, to be fair, maybe your cat.

I don't need comfort. Most especially, I don't need comfort when I do. Because the times in my life I've been the most afraid, isolated and humiliated are the times I most needed to at least _pretend_ I was strong enough not to need anybody. And of course, most of the time, I really don't need anyone.

However, it turns out that this is a problem. Because children _do_ need comfort. And I have one. And I have absolutely no idea how to give him what he needs. If he comes to me hurt because he tried something beyond his capabilities and he skinned his metaphorical knees, I generally make fun of him and then show him how to do it right, or else yell at him if it was something he was phenomenally stupid for trying to do in the first place. This... doesn't seem to meet any _other_ being's operational definition of comfort, but I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do. I mean, the Q do not do hugs and kisses. We just _don't_. And if I taught him to expect that, he'd grow up with a huge glaring weakness the others could use to take advantage of him.

_What is your favorite retreat from the world?_

Depends on what I'm retreating from. The Continuum is home, chicken soup and apple pie. If chicken soup and apple pie had nails in it. Sometimes I need to get away from the mortal universe because the stupidity is just overwhelming, and I need the witty banter and entertaining conflicts I can get at home. Or to be someplace where I'm a person, not some god or demon or projection of whatever bizarre ideas mortals want to pretend I represent. On the other hand, home is often incredibly boring, or incredibly vicious, or both at the same time. And there are times I really need to get _away_ from these people.

I build private pocket universes and hang out in them, watching what goes on with moderately entertaining mortals. It's sort of like coming home from work, plopping down on the sofa and putting on the television. Of course, like the television, sometimes I have six billion channels and even still nothing good's on, but that's the trouble with being as old and knowledgeable as I am - you've seen it all, and it's very hard to find something entertaining and new.

_Close your eyes and think about what you've been missing in your life lately. It could be a person, pet, place, thing, occasion, feeling. Anything at all that you miss dearly. _

A sense of purpose?

Something new to learn or observe?

Fun?

_What makes you angriest?_

Stupidity. Especially from those who _should__ be smarter than they are. _


	45. More Completely Unrelated Questions

_'What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.' Do you agree or disagree? Why?_

Depends on what you do with it.

At one point in the not-too-distant past, the Q Continuum saw fit to strip me of my powers, as I may have mentioned _ad nauseam._ I can't entirely say I didn't have it coming, I suppose, but it was the worst thing that has _ever_ happened to me, and as I am millions of years old and have had a lot of things happen to me, you may imagine it was impressively bad. I nearly died. Three times, actually. And when you consider that normally, I am immortal and damn near indestructible, you can imagine the impression this made on me.

For six years, in fact, it broke me.

I was not stronger as the result of having endured this near-death experience. I was cowed enough to obey my orders almost blindly, do things I considered stupid or even morally wrong, because I was on probation, terrified of losing my powers again.

I finally got back the courage to stand up for my beliefs after one of our philosophers sought the right to die, and defied the Continuum to do it. After he was dead, I felt that it was literally a matter of the Continuum's survival - he would not be the last of us to kill himself out of boredom if we didn't change. And for once, it wasn't about me being bored, or about me rebelling against authority because it was there. I was still afraid they might kill me - or take my powers away, which if the sentence isn't rescinded is a longer, slower version of the same thing - but for once, I had a cause to fight for, something more important than my own life and happiness. Mind you, I didn't expect a _war_ to start - but when it did, I fought in it, despite the fact that they had invented weapons which could actually destroy other Q. I faced death - and, occasionally, was forced to kill - to save the Continuum from its long slow slide into stasis. Probably, I wouldn't have managed to muster up the courage for that if I hadn't had experience with facing death.

Does adversity make you stronger? Only if you let it.

_Have you ever woken up in the morning and not remembered what you did the night before?_

**What is this obsession you people have with sleep?**

You know, I've only slept once in my existence, and here's the thing that amazes me. I don't remember _any_ of it.

Oh, you mortals who sleep all the time simply take it for granted that you don't remember what happens while you're doing it. But then, you're used to forgetting, period. As witness, this question.

The Q have much better memories than mortals do. I can, if I choose (which I don't, because it was boring enough to live through the first time), remember every single thing that has happened to me in five billion years. Except for those few hours I spent sleeping on the _Enterprise._

So technically speaking, I think every single one of you people who _do_ sleep don't remember what you did the night before when you wake up. 


	46. And still more silly questions

I'm bored. Time to answer more silly questions!

_Write a letter to yourself as a child._

No.

When I was - well, not a _child_, I was never exactly a child, but young and new - the universe was a fantastical, huge place full of magnificent things. Secrets to learn, places to explore, wondrous sights to see.

Five billion years later I have seen everything there is to see, learned everything there is to learn - about the universe, anyway - and I have become extremely cynical and jaded.

I have no desire to corrupt my younger self with knowledge from the future. Let me turn into an old embittered cynic in my own good time. It was one of the greatest joys of my existence, to be the person I was when I was young, to feel what I felt then. It's a necessary property of the universe, and of my immortality, that I became what I've become, but why rush it?

Even if I had no concern for temporal paradoxes, I wouldn't attempt to communicate with my younger self. Let him learn what he's going to learn in the time frame I learned it in.

_Write about an overheard remark or secret that you were not supposed to have heard._

Oh, there are so many! Being omnipotent and telepathic does that, you know. I know everything I want to know about anyone I'm interested in. So, of course, I know all the secrets I'm not supposed to know.

Mind you, most of the people who wish they could keep secrets from me know that they can't. But they live in denial anyway, pretending I don't know what I know, because it makes them feel better, and until I tell them to their faces that I know better - which I have been known to do - they can manage to convince themselves that I'm just not paying enough attention to have figured out whatever they wish they could hide from me.

For instance, after seven years of abstinence in which her sole sexual outlets consisted of a brief period of fun and games with her first officer while they both thought they were stranded on a planet forever, a hologram, and a guy she met when she had amnesia, Kathy has occasionally found herself fantasizing about what would have happened if she'd taken me up on my offer. She'd be positively mortified if she let herself realize I know this, of course.

If I ever feel like I need to use it to make a point, I might make sure she knows I know. But for the moment, I don't feel any need to tell her. It would only lead to my having to explain that I only ever wanted her as a mother for my child, anyway. I mean, she's a fine woman, don't get me wrong, and if she threw herself at me I probably wouldn't say no, but I dunno. She lacks a certain _je ne sais quoi._ I like her well enough, for a human, but the utter fascination I've felt with certain humans - well, it just isn't there. If I hadn't been certain that Vash has the maternal instincts of a lizard and that Jean-Luc would have subjected me to interminable lectures about human superiority before even considering my proposal - and would have rejected it out of hand unless I agreed to do the pregnancy part, and frankly, I think I'd rather have been shot - I probably wouldn't have asked Kathy in the first place.

_Do you tend to make friends easily? Why/why not? _

No, oddly enough.

I'm an outgoing, friendly guy with an attractive form, a snappy dress sense and a great sense of humor. I have no idea why nearly everyone I meet wants to kill me. 


	47. Monogamy is a Lame Excuse

_What are your thoughts about monogamy?_

That it makes no sense whatsoever.

I mean, I understand envy. I'll freely confess that when, for whatever reason, I can't get someone I want, and someone else _can_, I am hard put to refrain from turning my romantic rival into a seven-toed Bedelikan sloth. (In fact I did turn Beverly Crusher into a dog once. Wasn't much of a change, if you ask me.)

But if you're romantically involved with someone, whether that involves sordid mortal reproductive rituals or pure, unsullied unity of mental energies or however you want to do it, what does it matter if they're doing the same thing with someone else? What, there's only so much sex to go around? I guess if they do it with someone else enough that it's cutting into _your_ couple time with them, then yes, you'd have a point. But if you go away for a week, or a month, or ten thousand years, and they manage to find their own fun with someone else while you were gone, why would you _care?_

There are Q in the Continuum - my ex among them - who consider a Q having any strong emotional connection with a mortal whatsoever to be a dire transgression. _That_ makes sense. Annoys me immensely, but I understand it. Our emotional connection with our fellow Q is what generates the Continuum, and that in turn is what makes us omnipotent and immortal, and if I seriously thought that a few Q blowing off their fellows for the space of a mortal lifetime or two was going to weaken the Continuum (which I don't, obviously), I would be against it too. But none of us have any problem with Q we particularly like having especial fondnesses for other Q, and I don't get why mortals are perfectly comfortable with their friends having other friends but so terribly upset about their lovers having other lovers.

_What is the lamest excuse you've ever given for something you've done?_

This is similar to asking me what I'd do if I could do one totally irresponsible thing. There's just too many to choose the _lamest_. I mean, when your fellows have forbidden you to do everything you consider fun, you get really, really creative with the lame excuses over the course of a billion years or so. However, here's an example that sort of fits in with what I was discussing above.

I've mentioned, earlier, having a bit of a thing for a certain human starship captain. Ahem. Well, I recall turning up on his doorstep offering to give him a present, after he'd more or less saved my life, the only time up to that point it had ever been vulnerable. I admitted to him that I owed him a debt. He essentially slammed the door in my face - told me to pay my debt by leaving. Hah. Like that was going to happen. I always enjoyed the fact that Picard never behaved as if he was particularly afraid of me, but sometimes it _was_ irritating, the extent to which he refused to recognize that I really could de-evolve him into a sea slug if I felt like it. And then, to make matters far worse, his girlfriend showed up. And she was a thief!

Now you have to understand that Picard is Mr. Morality Incarnate. I chose him as the exemplar of humanity precisely _because_ he seeks to embody humanity's highest ideals. So the idea that he was in love with this woman who was, by his standards, patently immoral... well, it would have been funny if it hadn't been juxtaposed with him trying to throw _me_ off his ship. I mean, _I'm_ omnipotent. What could she offer him that I couldn't? I even admitted to him that I could take a female form if I wanted, although I phrased it as that I would have done it to throw him off balance if I'd known it would have had such a profound effect. (Which, I suppose, is also a lame excuse.)

Finally I decided to demonstrate to him what a really bad idea it was to rub my nose in the fact that he was capable of desiring a weak, inferior human who fell far from meeting his moral standards while at the same time refusing to give me the time of day. I threw him, his crew, and his girlfriend into a scenario taken from human folklore, Robin Hood. The setup was that his girlfriend was being held prisoner by the local constable (me) and being executed because she refused to marry some ugly lout of a nobleman. He was supposed to try to rescue her and get his fool self killed, at which point I would step in and observe that he was an idiot, that he'd gotten himself killed for love, and that fortunately he amused me enough that I would bring him back, thus demonstrating my superiority _and_ absolving my debt for his saving _my_ life. (Also, getting him back for throwing me in a brig. I _was_ going to forgive that in the light of the life saving and all, but since he was being an asshole...)

Only the girl wouldn't follow the script. She agreed to marry the lout! This amused me. I like watching mortals use trickery and subverting the paradigm they're supposed to follow. Then she used the fact that she was willing to marry the guy to get a message to Jean-Luc, and he would have successfully rescued her (I was going to let it happen, given how amusing her audacity and deceit were) if they hadn't wasted all the time I was willing to give them bickering. So I was going to go through with the "execution" (and there they were, _still_ bickering; on the one hand, I thought it demonstrated that Picard trusted me much more than he'd admit, that he was so unafraid of me killing him that he was willing to fight with his girlfriend while going to his death; on the other hand, it demonstrated that he wasn't taking me seriously, either, so I thought I probably would actually kill the girl just to shake him up.) Then his crew came in and rescued him. By the parameters of the game I'd set up, he'd won, so I let him go - but I pulled aside his gal pal for a little chat.

As I've mentioned, Vash intrigued me. She wasn't particularly scared of me either, an attitude I find both infuriating and refreshing from mortals. And unlike Picard, _she_ could see the value in having an omnipotent best buddy. So I offered her the deal Picard had turned down - I would take her anywhere in the universe she wanted to go, show her anything she wanted to see. (This was not altruism on my part. After you've been around five billion years, the universe can be an incredibly boring place. The most excitement I generally get is helping mortals I find worthy of me to explore it, seeing things through their eyes.) And she accepted.

Of course I had to let her say goodbye to Picard. And they both demanded I pretend to give them privacy. I can see them whether I'm manifested in a human form in the room with them or not, but I guess the prospect of my spying on them in my godlike, bodiless state bothered them less. But I did want to remind them that I could watch them if I felt like it. So I popped in while they were making kissyface. The lame excuse was that I claimed to have forgotten my hat. (Since I manufactured the hat from the ether of nothingness in the first place, and they knew it, and knew I could have either teleported the hat or simply made a new one... it was as deliberately lame an excuse as I could come up with.)

(And I will state, for the record, that I didn't start doing things like making men Vash was interested in fall asleep until _after_ she had decided that our deal was off and she no longer wanted to take me up on my generous offer. I didn't care who she slept with before that.) 


	48. The weight of history or something

Ancestry and inheritance mean something rather different to immortals than to mortals, I imagine.

_Talk about something you inherited. (It could be an object, a physical attribute, a belief, etc.)_

My entire nature as a Q was built into me by the actions of my creators/parents/ancestors. Everything that I am, I could say I inherited from them. And yet, they are mostly totally lame. See below.

_What do your ancestors mean to you?_

The Q ones, or the pre-Q ones?

The beings that my species were before we were Q were pretty damn impressive as mortal creatures were, if I do say so myself. They were shapeshifters who developed sentience by eating each other. No, I'm not making this up. I'd say look it up for yourself but since they ceased to exist about seven billion years ago, that would be a little hard for anyone not as puissant as I am, and we guard our history jealously - obviously, if someone mucked with time before we came to exist, we might not exist, which doesn't really thrill any of us for obvious reasons, so we don't encourage visitors to our past.

In any case, after conquering what was the known universe at the time, they got bored with the joys of mortal existence and decided that they wanted to know everything and be all-powerful. That's where we came in.

I have described the origin of the Q Continuum before, but only briefly. My ancestors tamed a negentropic dimension of limitless energy and total chaos by transforming themselves from mortal shapeshifters to beings made of the stuff and substance of that dimension, creating an overmind - the Continuum - to channel infinite power. Pretty impressive stuff, sure. But what have they done lately?

See, my Q ancestors are as immortal as I am. The pioneers who created the Continuum are still here, doddering around the place and regaling us with stories about how the young whippersnappers like us have it better than we know, and when _they_ were young there wasn't any of this comprehension of infinity stuff, and boy how they _wished_ then that they could have the kind of problems we have now. Of course that _is_ the problem - they wished for the kind of problems immortality and omniscience bring, and now _we're_ the ones stuck with the mind-numbing boredom. Thanks, Granddads and Grandmams.

I continue to disagree with my dead pal Q about the value of death to the Continuum, but if anyone needed to die for the rest of us to move on to whatever might lie ahead of us, I think those guys are number one on the list.

_What keeps you up at night?_

My superior nature that does not require sleep, if you mean this literally, but I'd simply rip all my hair out in frustration at the mortal-centric nature of these questions if I always took them literally, and as much as the look becomes _mon capitaine_ I would look awful bald, so I'll interpret this to mean what worries the hell out of me.

What I fear is that this _is_ all there is. That we won't move forward, because there's no forward to go to. That for the rest of eternity all we will ever be is what we are now. Because what we are now is nifty keen, don't get me wrong, and I certainly don't want to be less than a Q... but it's _boring,_ to be eternal. If you're going to be unchanging, then what was the point to not dying? Aren't you essentially already dead, that way? Only sentient enough to understand it? I mean, at least when mortals die, they no longer are aware that they're dead... or else they _do_ change state and become something other than what they were. If you are the same throughout eternity, you're living dead. That's not the eternity I want for myself, or my people, or my son. 


	49. Human Nature

_Name one thing about human nature that puzzles you. (Or your own species/race, if you are not human and don't wish to do this on humans.) _

I have to limit myself to _just one thing?_ There are so many! I mean, I'm _vastly_ more knowledgeable than nearly anyone else in the universe, and yet, humans are so ridiculous I could write a book about it.

**Naah, I can't stick to just one.**

EVOLUTION: Can you believe these bozos actually _questioned_ the concept that they were related to monkeys? I mean, look at them. Really *look* at them. Then look at a monkey. Then shave the monkey. How do you miss that resemblance?

They used to insist that they couldn't be monkeys because they were created in the image of God. Well, how did they know _God_ wasn't a monkey? (Actually, I know quite a few gods who enjoy taking the shape of monkeys... but I digress.)

WARS OVER RELIGION: I can grasp the idea of war a bit better than I used to be able to, now that we've actually fought one. But our war was over differing ideologies, with the survival of the entire Q Continuum at stake. I can understand war over limited resources. But war over _god?_ When you all believe that your God is going to punish unbelievers in an afterlife, anyway? Why _exactly_ would an omnipotent, omniscient entity need _you_ to act as his enforcer? He can't do his own dirty work? I got news, honey, omnipotent entities do *not* need mortals to kill other mortals to enforce their edicts. We can do it ourselves. The only point to getting mortals to kill each other over how much they believe in you is that it's damn funny.

SEX: Yeah, it's fun and all, but really, it's not all that. Why do humans organize their entire _lives_ around it? Particularly when they then turn around and refuse to talk about it at all? I must be missing something. I've tried it with a few hundred humans and, y'know, it's nice, but so's riding a roller coaster and people don't organize their whole lives around that.

And on that topic:

HUMAN WOMEN: You're half the population of humanity and you raise the kids, but for all but 300 years or so of human history you've let men push you around, claim you have the brains of a pet dog, and treat you like property. Exactly why did you put up with this? Your species is perfectly capable of banding together to fight a mutual threat that's a lot bigger and meaner than you, so don't tell me it's because the big meanies are stronger than you are.

Oh, this is like shooting fish in a barrel. I'd better stop before I get off on a decade-long rant. 


	50. This is a trick question, isn't it?

_What is your worst quality as a significant other?_

Am I supposed to take this question seriously? I mean, by definition, everyone who thinks I have bad qualities as a significant other must have questionable taste, to reject a being like _me_. Am I actually supposed to care what such beings think?

(sigh) Very well, as a thought exercise I'll *try* to pretend to take their objections seriously.

1. _I'm arrogant, overbearing, and I think I know everything._ In my defense, I *do* know everything, and besides which, being arrogant and overbearing are species traits that any Q would have, so if a mortal is going to complain about these aspects of dating a Q it's rather like me complaining that mortals die. I mean, you don't see me bitching about people and dumping them unceremoniously just because they're eventually going to die on me, and I consider that a _much_ graver sin than simply having a healthy amount of self-esteem.

2. _I'm egotistical._ See above. It's hard to be humble when you're a god.

3. _I'm thoughtless, irresponsible and hedonistic._ I fail to see why being a hedonist is a _bad_ trait in a significant other, but I have had that accusation leveled at me. As for being irresponsible, give me something to be responsible _for_ and I'm not nearly as bad with it as everyone told me I would be. This one is actually an accusation my Q partners have made at me. I took them seriously once upon a time, but now, one of my loudest accusers has run out on me and our kid, so who's irresponsible again?

4. _I don't care about anyone but myself._ Not true. Why would I bother to manifest myself to lowly mortal beings and actually interact with them if I didn't care? I mean, there's plenty of beings in the universe I don't care about, but they're not in a position to say anything about it because they haven't met me. If I bother to talk to mortals I at least care a little bit.

5. _I'm too sexy._ It's true - sex with a godlike entity can ruin a mortal for their fellow limited beings. I try not to blow their little minds _too_ badly, but you never really know how much pleasure a mortal can take until they fall apart and you have to put them back together and erase their memories that it ever happened. 


	51. Waiting for blah

_What are you waiting for?_

The inevitable, I suppose.

**All good things...**

Every time I enjoy myself, every time I have something interesting to do, there's a tiny nagging voice at the back of my mind, the voice of five billion years' experience, telling me "this too shall pass." Sooner or later I'm going to get bored. Or, if it's something tangible that entertains me, something of the matter universe, like a mortal being or an entire planet... well, eventually it'll die. Those are the only two outcomes. No happiness lasts forever.

I have, some have said, an appalling lack of foresight for an omnipotent, immortal being. I suppose it's true. I try very hard to live in the moment, to face the future with my hands over my eyes yelling "LA LA LA I CAN'T SEE YOU", and it has not always served me well. I admit I have occasionally been blindsided by something I should have seen coming. But the thing about being immortal and damn near impossible to destroy is that the rare occasions when something could actually threaten me if I don't see it coming are far, far outnumbered by the times I'd have been bored to mindlessness if I had been able to predict my life ahead of time. I have to try to take every moment as it comes, to enjoy what I have right now and not think about what's coming, because it's always the same.

All good things come to an end.

I had my son in order to create something that would last. To have something I could enjoy without fearing the inevitable end. And I love him, I do. But, y'know, there were times in my existence that I loved many another Q, and... we all know how that story ended. Each time. In a billion years, when the novelty of his childishness and my responsibility for raising him are gone, when he's just another Q like the rest of us, will I care about him any more than I do the others? I look to mortal species with their own children for guidance, and the results are frankly not encouraging.

Maybe it would be different if I didn't have such a tremendous need for novelty in my existence. If I wasn't so easily bored, so driven to seek out what's new and different (because after five billion years of doing it? There ain't much left, I can tell you that.) But the Q who killed himself was a philosopher, a calm, respectable sort of fellow, not a novelty-obsessed hedonist like me... and he killed himself out of boredom. So... I'm guessing it's not just me.

So what am I waiting for?

For everything I love and everything I touch to turn to dust and emptiness, of course. Isn't everyone? 


	52. Moving Right Along

Oh, now, that was a depressing ending, wasn't it.

See, a few thousand years ago I found this nifty nexus of... well, questions. With entities from all over the multiverse, answering the questions or having little snippets of their memories presented within the nexus as answers.

Here's the thing. I have explored the entire universe. Now that my son is an adolescent, he's not exactly fresh and new either. I need something new to learn. So I thought at first I'd check the place out because there might be something new to see, and then I started answering the questions because I dearly love the sound of my own voice, and then I discovered that I could use them as a tool to actually explore _myself._ I mean, the Q don't ask me deep probing questions and I'd just lie to them anyway if they did. There are a lot of things I discovered I never really think about myself unless someone actually _asks_ me.

And then I answered a question which made me face the fact that in the long run, my existence will be utterly pointless and futile. Unless I die. In which case it will be equally pointless and futile but I won't necessarily live long enough to notice.

At this point I decided I was sick of introspection, and ran off to go do something more entertaining. And then my kid got old enough to start getting into _serious_ trouble. And now I'm stuck babysitting him more or less full-time again, as part of a bargain I made with the Continuum to keep them from taking his powers away.

I am _so_ bored.

So I'm going to go back and answer some more ridiculous questions, because it's not as if I can go stir up trouble when I've got to be a role model for the kid, and I gotta have _something_ to do, right? 


End file.
